Dial M For Murder (1954), directed by Alfred Hitchcock.
The perfect murder: what could go wrong?
Random notes after another viewing, my first time on Blu-ray:
Drawing-room murder plots are supposed to be light, cozy crime stories. Here, only Milland acts the part of dapper stage villain, and even he becomes creepy and unsettling in his cold-blooded, intelligent focus on murdering his wife. Cary Grant wanted the part but it's hard imagining him being quite so sinister.
But watch his face when he listens to her being strangled: it hurts him. He has regrets. Later he won't sleep in her bed while she's in prison waiting to be hanged. He's bad, but not beyond feeling guilt.
The lovers are guilty, too. What do they deserve?
Like the heist film, in the perfect murder plot we wonder how much will work and where it will go wrong. We want the villain to succeed, and we want him to be caught.
The husband has a cunning Plan A where nothing can go wrong. Everything goes wrong. But in seconds he devises an even better Plan B, blaming his wife for murder with no suspicion on himself. We can't help but admire his quick, bold thinking.
To our surprise, boyfriend Bob Cummings comes up with Plan C, a fictional version of the original Plan A. He's just trying to fabricate an alibi for her, even if it means the husband has to sacrifice himself.
Police Inspector John Williams (a Hitchcock regular) devises his own secret Plan D to catch the murderer. He seems like a stock stage policeman and not until the final moments do we realize how scary-good he is at his job.
The murder attempt on Grace Kelly is really quite brutal for this type of picture. Their grappling seems like sexual convulsions. We see the scissors driven into his back.
Let us note how utterly believable Anthony Dawson is as the would-be murderer, a petty scoundrel who will kill if (a) he has no other choice and (b) there is sufficient money involved.
One of the Japanese "Taxing Woman" movies has a semi-comic quote: the woman is being strangled as she reaches back to the camera...finally grabbing a tape dispenser (?) and bashing her assailant.
Adapted from a play. Hitchcock obviously didn't mind using a limited set: see Lifeboat (1944), Rope (1948) and Rear Window (1954).
He said the natural impulse when filming a play is to "open it up" and make it more cinematic, but that this is an error, just wasting time. He demonstrates his own technique here: a couple at breakfast reading the paper, news of a ocean liner arriving, quick shot of the boat, then the illicit lovers locked in an embrace, she in a passion-red dress. Just a few seconds, much more efficient than you could do it on stage, but you have to learn not to elaborate the plot just to make it more film-like.
Why did he make it? He needed something safe at that moment. You want a sure success: film a stage play.
Truffaut: "This is one of the pictures I see over and over again. I enjoy it more each time I see it. Basically, it's a dialogue picture, but the cutting, the rhythm, and the direction of the players are so polished that one listens to each sentence religiously."
Hitchcock: "I just did my job."
Years ago someone asked me: "I fell asleep during Dial M For Murder last night; how did the police finally figure it out?" I had to pause: "It had something to do with the keys..." but then muddled the explanation. They are hard to track.
Available on Blu-ray in the original 3D, which I suspect few people saw at the time it was released.
I watched it in 2D. Detail is very poor for Blu-ray, hardly better than the DVD. The heavy grain is intact so this may be due to the lenses required for 3D. There seems to be a very narrow zone of good focus with everything closer or further away looking blurry. From time to time we'll see a face that begins looking pretty good, then the scene shifts and we lose it. I don't recall this effect on the DVD so I'm not sure what's up.
Still, the color is good and the aspect ratio is the correct 1.85:1. The DVD had been cropped to 1.33, which makes a difference.