70,000 Witnesses

"70,000 Witnesses" is an extremely old football movie with stars who are long gone. It is a murder mystery which works until the murder and murderer are uncovered by Det. David Landau, one of my old time favorites. Johnny Mack Brown is the murdered player, and Philips Holmes is the leading man of the piece.

Much footage is shot in the Los Angeles Coliseum and some stock footage of games is used. This, as reviewers have noted, is supposed to be the big game between State and University, a clever use of school names. All goes well until the last half hour. Then takes place one of the most labored and preposterously contrived solutions to a murder in modern forensic science, which I thought was an anticlimax to a fairly good mystery up to that time. I was surprised to learn that it was a hit in its time, which just goes to show that you can fool some of the people some of the time - especially if it's a depression era audience.