Dial M for Murder | Alfred Hitchcock | 1954 | USA | Format: 35mm | 105 min
A talkie script conveyed with such attentive visual camerawork (what else can you expect from Hitchcock?). A movie that reveals how diabolical plans on paper are always perfect until human error factors in when performed in real life. Also, no character in this movie is completely innocent. I truly enjoyed Hitchcock's use of an active narrator to tell this story because he didn't actually need to embellish the action of what was essentially a stage play. The GOD POV to show Tony's plan and the hiding of the key are my favorite moments.
But don't take my word for it... David Bordwell has an eye-opening and insightful analysis of this film which is worth the time of any filmmaker to read in full.
Money quote:
A talkie script conveyed with such attentive visual camerawork (what else can you expect from Hitchcock?). A movie that reveals how diabolical plans on paper are always perfect until human error factors in when performed in real life. Also, no character in this movie is completely innocent. I truly enjoyed Hitchcock's use of an active narrator to tell this story because he didn't actually need to embellish the action of what was essentially a stage play. The GOD POV to show Tony's plan and the hiding of the key are my favorite moments.
But don't take my word for it... David Bordwell has an eye-opening and insightful analysis of this film which is worth the time of any filmmaker to read in full.
Money quote:
No viewer will ever forget the far more hideous death that the would-be killer suffers onscreen. After flopping over Margot, apparently dead, he snaps back to life spasmodically, as if jolted by bursts of electricity. His body yanks itself erect, his arms twisting helplessly as he tries to withdraw the knife, before he turns over and hits the floor . The impact drives the knife further into his back. Hitchcock celebrates the moment with an Eisensteinian overlapping cut to a close-up of the scissors. He had a special pit dug, he proudly told a reporter, to make the lens flush with the floor.
So much for just setting up the camera and photographing the people acting. We could point to other alterations from the play, such as the strained drawing-room courtesies that frame the whole story. “Let me get you another drink,” is the film’s first line, as Margot and Mark pull out of a passionate clinch. At the end, nabbed, Tony offers to pour his wife and her lover a drink, and then asks the detective: “I suppose you’re still on duty, Inspector?” There’s also the peculiar mustache motif. The play text and the film dialogue mock Lesgate/ Swann slightly for growing one, but the film adds the mini-gag of self-satisfied Inspector Hubbard calmly combing his own mustache.
Fine as these isolated moments are, Hitchcock’s treatment is more thoroughgoing. He does, as he tells us, use cinematic means “to narrate a story taken from a stage play.” But those means are unusual and instructive.
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