A Drama of Crime And Community

BEFORE WE SEE A GUN, a bullet or a drop of blood, we see tall grass swaying in the breeze.

- PETER TONGUETTE

Amid the grass there is a mass of men, women and children walking peaceably but confidently. We soon discern, from their unmistakably austere manner of dress, that they belong to the Amish community; we quickly realize that they have gathered for a funeral.

These images constitute the stirring, surprising opening of Peter Weir's peerless thriller "Witness." The film, which was released by Paramount Pictures 40 years ago this month, will eventually develop into a police procedural of rare drama and intensity, but not before Mr. Weir lays the firm foundation for the setting with which it begins and to which it returns: an Amish community in Pennsylvania in 1984. If one of the signatures of the Hitchcock technique is situating suspense in unlikely settings-amid a paradisal small town in "Shadow of a Doubt" or atop Mount Rushmore in "North by Northwest"-then "Witness" is among the most Hitchcockian movies to be released in the master's wake.