Dial M for Murder
(1954)
(SPOILERS) Not generally regarded as in the upper echelon of
Hitchcocks, and certainly one the director, in his self-deprecating way,
regarded as a stop-gap, taking on the Broadway hit “because it was coasting, playing it safe”. What’s remarkable about Dial M for Murder, however, is the
manner in which its director makes the limits of the original medium
irrelevant, not by “ventilating the play”,
as Truffaut put it, but through averring that “the basic quality of the play is precisely its confinement within the
proscenium”.
In other words, it’s all still pretty much set in one room,
and as Peter Bogdanovich observed “It is
a triumph of shooting a talky play in a small circumstance”. Hitch’s advice
to “Just shoot the play” may sound
simple, but it fails to explain why so many “just shot” plays make such arid,
inert films. It takes an auteur to know intuitively how to bring out the
material, even though, for the most part, there’s little in Dial M for Murder that draws attention
to itself in terms of stylistic flourish. Hitchcock really does make its
success seem deceptively simple. There was vaunted 3D involved (I haven’t
watched that version), at the insistence of the studio, although the director
dismissed its importance, commenting that there were “very few effects directly in relief”.
The exception stylistically is, unsurprisingly, the central (attempted)
murder sequence, as Swann (Anthony Dawson, Professor Dent in Dr. No), blackmailed by Tony Wendice
(Ray Milland) into murdering his adulterous wife Margot (Grace Kelly) attempts,
rather ineptly, to strangle her. Hitchcock ratchets up the tension ruthlessly, with
Swann unable to make his move due to a pesky intrusive telephone cable, and
when he strikes, the struggle finds Margot falling back onto a desk, her hand
outstretched towards the camera (all the better for 3D) grasping for some sort
of implement, until she locates a pair of scissors that she promptly plunges
into her assailant’s back. Who then proceeds to jerk upwards, and particularly
grimly, fall backwards, further embedding the makeshift weapon.
If that’s the most cinematically effective scene of tension,
though, there’s nevertheless a masterful line running throughout, taking in the
classic Hitchcock approach of making us feel for the bad guy, be it the
obstacles Swann encounters in his attempted murder or smooth, urbane Tony
realising his watch has stopped and that his best-laid plans may be botched.
Indeed, as Bogdanovich notes, Hitchcock’s casting of Milland as someone to
root for is merely underlined by how unlikeable Robert Cummings’ Mark Halliday
is.
Hitchcock might have cast someone closer to Kelly’s age
(Cummings was five years younger than Milland, but still twenty older than
Kelly) to suggest that her attraction/carrying on was reasonable, but instead he
puts her in a red dress (formerly white, when we first see her having breakfast
with Tony) and gives Mark a line in self-assured petulance. We’re irritated
that he appears to have worked out Tony’s scheme precisely. Less so that Chief
Inspector Hubbard (John Williams, also in the director’s The Paradine Case and To
Catch a Thief), an affable sort, is revealed to nurse his own suspicions
and seems just as annoyed by Halliday as the audience (“They talk about flat-footed policemen. May the saints protect us from
the gifted amateur”).
Kelly would go on to be identified as the ultimate Hitchcock
ice queen, but Margot is nothing much to shout about as character, aside from
her heroic success against Swann. There’s an imaginatively minimalist shot of
her trial (the camera is on her as we hear the verdict), but she disappears
from much of the latter third before returning to the scene of the crime where
she requires a pep talk in fortitude (“Try
and hang on just a little longer”). Apart from being Grace Kelly (no small
thing), Margot has little going for her. Certainly, woeful judgement since she
has a blissful life with a chump to look forward to.
While the transition from stage to screen is all down to
Hitchcock as far as credit goes (Frederick Knott adapted his own play), this
would be nothing without Milland’s enormously charming performance. The early
invitation to Swann to murder finds Tony, entirely casually and confidently,
clearing up fingerprints after the man he has already assured himself will do
the deed. That he remains unflappable when plans go awry makes him one of the
most endearing Hitchcock villains. Indeed, you want to let him off for the
final scene alone, in which, rumbled, he gives up any aspiration to escape and
cheerful compliments his captor (“Congratulations,
Inspector”) before offering drinks to all present.
The conceit of a perfect murder (used for the title of the 1998 remake, which is respectable in its own right thanks to expert casting –
Michael Douglas, Gwyneth Paltrow and Viggo Mortenson – and choosing a different
tack to the original) is a bit of a dodge really, though, as Mark suggests such
a deed is only possible “On paper”.
As a fiction writer, though, he inevitably deals in plots where the murderer is
eventually brought to justice; it’s generally in reality that the murderer gets
away with his crime.
Dial M for Murder
may not be many people’s absolute favourite Hitchcock film, then, but it’s one
in which his nonchalant confidence in knowing precisely what was required to
bring the material to the screen is unparalleled. He even makes the most economical
of cameos (on a framed reunion dinner photo that Tony shows Swann).
