| Matthew Christensen |
Dial M for Murder plays at the Trylon Cinema from Sunday, February 2nd, through Tuesday, February 4th. For tickets, showtimes, and other series information, visit trylon.org.
I teach film and theatre at an international high school in Japan, and have spent the last few days in tech rehearsals for our theater club’s production of Our Town. I have pulled out what little hair I have in my head handling last-minute crises—a locked door with sound equipment behind it and no one around with a key to unlock it, cast members out skiing for the day calling to say they would be a bit late, a lead actor developing a fever 24 hours before opening night. Then there are the small conversations one has in between running around to make sure everything is ready, encouraging actors to warm their lines, and assuring the ones who sense their performance is a bit one-note that all they need now is an audience and the whole thing will come to life. Pep talks like these are common in high school theater.
There is really no profound reason to share this information except it is fresh in my mind and my husband asked me what my hook would be for this piece. He likes it when I start with a personal story and so I started writing about my hectic weekend, hoping to make some connection. I started writing about the theater not just because Hitchcock’s Dial M for Murder is an adaptation of a stage play, but because my first Perisphere blog piece published a little under a year ago was also about another Hitchcock classic (aren’t they all?): Shadow of a Doubt, a deeply personal film for the director. The on-location shoot in Santa Rosa, California—uncharacteristic for Hitchcock—with a team of solid film and theatre actors was pleasant. Moreover, Hitchcock and his wife Alma Reville were avid theatergoers and the screenplay for the film was written (in part) by none other than Thornton Wilder, who also penned Our Town. Dial M for Murder is nothing like Our Town. It is nothing like Shadow of a Doubt (1943). Some might even say it’s nothing like Hitchcock.
Except it is.
Written for the stage and adapted for film by Frederick Knott, Dial M for Murder feels more like an adaptation of an Agatha Christie play than your typical Hitchcock thriller. The nearly air-tight plot, carefully planned and then quickly and cleverly altered when killer becomes victim, seems to share stronger connections to The Mousetrap than, say, Notorious or Vertigo, where mysteries are merely McGuffins used to explore the intricacies of romantic relationships. The story opens, like many Hitchcock films, on the exterior of a building (in this case a London flat in Mayfair), and moves in, revealing what is behind. A metaphorical curtain that opens, signaling the opening act, and indeed, the interior we see—the space that we will inhabit for the next 105 minutes—looks exactly like a theatrical set. This curtain pullback also suggests that we are being given a privileged view of the intimate lives of those who populate this space. We move inside to find a cheerfully mundane couple, Mr. and Mrs. Wendice. Tony Wendice (Ray Milland) is a retired tennis pro, while his wife Margot (Grace Kelly, in her first of three Hitchcock films) is an independently wealthy socialite. We see the two at the breakfast table. He is blithely tossing salt over his shoulder while she reads the morning paper. Hitchcock’s camera picks up Margot’s glance of recognition at something in the paper and her guilty glance at Tony before cutting to an item announcing the arrival of American mystery writer Mark Halliday (Robert Cummings), with whom Margot had had an affair the previous year. Once Tony leaves for work, we cut to a shot of the same room at some later time that day to see Margot, now in a scarlet evening gown, in the embrace of former lover Mark. Their kiss exudes sexual desire, forming a counterpoint to the rather chaste kiss between Margot and her husband in the previous scene.
These initial moments in the film set a tone of ambiguity and moral dilemma in the minds of the audience even before we fully realize it. We hear a determined Margot trying to explain to Mark how she has rekindled her affection for her husband in the last year, how he has changed, and how happy she is. She also recounts to Mark how her purse, containing the only love letter she kept of his, was stolen at Victoria station, and how she subsequently received two blackmail letters. The cuckolded husband soon comes home, begging off an evening out claiming a work deadline. Tony sends his wife and Mark off to the theater. It is important here to note how Tony stage-directs almost every scene he is in, acting as a kind of surrogate for Hitchcock. He moves about the flat, putting everything just so in preparation for a meeting with a former classmate—Charles Swann (Anthony Dawson). Swann, a man with a criminal history whom Tony will induce to murder his adulterous wife allowing him to hang on to Margot’s wealth and guarantee a continuation of the lifestyle to which he has grown accustomed, is persuaded by a large sum of money. Yet, the real persuasion seems to come from Tony’s masterful plotting. His meticulous description of exactly how and where the murder will take place, his walk-through of every moment reminds one of his directorial control. It may also remind fans of Hitchcock of stories told by actors in interviews of being called into the director’s office to be regaled with, mesmerized by, his retelling of the story, how every frame of the film was worked out in his head before principal filming.
I won’t begin to describe Tony’s plan here as it would be too complex and only spoil the fun. Suffice it to say, the plan goes wrong when Margot kills her assassin in self-defense, leaving Tony with nothing to do but alter the plot to suggest that the dead man was Margot’s blackmailer and incriminate Margot in premeditated murder by way of suggestion, evidence tampering, and a key. The subversive casting (as Peter Bogdanovich once described it) of the very charming Ray Milland as Tony, against the relatively light-weight personality of Robert Cummings as Mark, immediately pulls our sympathies toward the scheming, wronged husband even as we root for Mark, with the aid of Inspector Hubbard (John Williams), to get at the truth before Margot is hanged for murder.
Throughout the film, Hitchcock reminds us that we are watching a stage play. As Wes Anderson would do decades later in his films, Hitchcock provides constant reminders of the theatricality of what we are watching. At several key moments in the film, Tony appears perched on a corner of the writing desk with a decidedly stagy velvet green curtain behind him—curtains he, as director, opens and closes. The choice to restrict all action in the play to the interior of the Wendice home (with only a couple of exterior shots) further reminds us of the limitations of a stage set (oddly enough, we do not feel restricted the way we do in Jeff’s apartment in Rear Window). Furthermore, at several key moments as Tony explains his murderous plan to Swann, Hitchcock chooses to position the camera at an extreme low angle, as if we are sitting in the front row of a proscenium arch. Yet these shots go further than simply providing the perspective of a theater audience; they make both men appear top-heavy and towering, as if they are about to topple over, hinting at the outcome of their plan.
Later, when Tony blocks out each step of what he wants Swann to do on the night of the murder, the camera cuts to an extreme high angle. We map out the plan along with Tony and Swann, almost as if we were watching a rehearsal in a black box theatre. At the same time, the extreme high angle allows us to look down upon them, to marvel at Tony’s cunning while still maintaining a kind of detached moral superiority. Hitchcock occasionally breaks from this theatrically-focused cinematography to include more typical thriller movie shots: The initial, rather innocuous, characterization of Swann framed in medium shots is transformed, through Dutch angles and low-key lighting, to that of a menacing monster. In this same scene, Hitchcock gives a nod to Victorian melodrama and silent film acting in the over-the-top histrionics of Swann’s death. Margot defends herself with the only thing she can lay her hands on—a pair of scissors—stabbing her attacker in the back. Swann stands erect, arched spine, and throws his head back dramatically before pirouetting and falling, plunging the scissor blade deeper into his back.
Grace Kelly, filmed in a manner that must have, in part, inspired Laura Mulvey’s polemic on the male gaze, is often isolated in point-of-view shots. Hitchcock displays Kelly’s Margot as warm, confident, sexual, and alluring. In later scenes after her arrest, the demoralized Margot is shot without make-up, wearing decidedly dowdier clothes. She is still beautiful though—a bewildered damsel in distress. But Hitchcock’s gaze is also theatrical, representing a kind of voyeuristic peepshow: he depicts Margot at her most vulnerable moment in a thin, gauzy nightgown, then films her being violently attacked.
The denouement of Dial M is predictably theatrical in its satisfying wrapping up of loose ends. This is accomplished by shifts in directorship, from the brilliant plotting of Tony to the meddling intuition of Mark, and from Mark to Inspector Hubbard, who’s known a bit more than he has let on throughout his investigation. Despite the fact that the film assures us that justice will prevail and order will be restored, Hitchcock breaks the spell of the theatrical with a dose of reality. We laugh at the last shot of Inspector Hubbard combing his mustache as he calls Scotland Yard, but then remember that we are actually left with a traumatized woman and her rather inadequate lover, as well as a husband who will hang. We are also left with the uncomfortable notion that we are a bit sad to see Tony hang, Tony, whose cleverness has charmed us, making us forget that we’re not supposed to like him.
And this is what Hitchcock’s cinema is all about: exploiting our expectations then leaving us with a feeling of uncertainty, closing the curtain and reminding us that there is no such thing as a fairytale ending. The vital relationships he examines beneath the surface of genre, even at their best, break the Hollywood myth of marital bliss and hint at discord and instability: A jewel thief who’s cleared his name is chagrined at the realization that his happy ending, marrying the gorgeous blond, will result in the presence of an overbearing mother-in-law. A hapless, smitten sergeant escorts the object of his affection, a young woman who has just killed her husband for his part in the death of her young brother, into the obscurity of a crowded London street. The lives of a musician and his wife are turned upside-down when he is wrongly accused of theft—he is exonerated, she winds up in an asylum. Hitchcock’s cynicism about relations between the sexes leaves us doubtful as to the future of Margot and Mark, and perhaps a bit disinterested. We leave the theatre thinking about how clever and charming Tony is, and by association, Hitchcock himself.
Edited by Olga Tchepikova-Treon