While it's true that Hitchcock left most of the play's dialogue intact and kept the single setting of the play's apartment, he did quite a bit more to bring the story to life.
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To the dedicated movie buff, Alfred Hitchcock will always mean "The 39 Steps," "Rebecca," "Strangers on a Train," "Suspicion," "Rear Window," "Vertigo," things like that. But to the average moviegoer, several decades after the master director's death, his name means "Psycho" and maybe "The Birds." I learned this the hard way some time ago while teaching high school Film Studies. Almost all of my students over the years recognized Hitchcock's name, but almost none of them had ever seen a Hitchcock film. Asked who he was, most students would say something like, "Oh, he's the guy who wrote all those really scary movies." I would have to remind them, first, that Hitchcock was a director, not a writer; and, second, that "Psycho" and "The Birds," while among the director's most popular films, were aberrations, exceptions to his style. Hitch was even criticized for these departures from the norm, a norm which for him was suspense. As I don't need to tell you, when Hitchcock is referred to as the "master," it means the "master of suspense."
And that brings us to his 1954 production of "Dial M for Murder." It was one of a number of pictures Hitchcock made during a remarkable twelve-year period from 1951 to 1963 where he could do no wrong. He had a string of hits, which included, among others, "Strangers on a Train," "Rear Window," "The Wrong Man," "The Man Who Knew Too Much," "To Catch a Thief," "Vertigo, "North By Northwest," "Psycho," and "The Birds." As for "Dial M," Hitchcock said it practically filmed itself. He had the studio buy the rights to Frederick Knott's hit stage play and then hire Knott to write the screenplay. Hitch said he didn't change a thing, just pointed his camera. Which, of course, is nonsense. While it's true that Hitchcock left most of the play's dialogue intact and kept the single setting of the play's apartment, he did quite a bit more to bring the story to life.
Very few directors would dare confine their movies to one room, as Hitchcock does in this movie. Most directors want to open up a stage play or a screenplay to multiple locations to give it variety and to generate interest. Most directors don't trust the attention span of their audience or their own ability to keep an audience entertained for more than a few minutes at a time. Not so with Hitch. He was supremely confident of his ability to maintain an audience's attention. He had already proved it in "Rear Window," which takes place almost entirely in a single room, and in "Rope," which failed at the box office but for other reasons.
Anyway, the setting for "Dial M" is a London flat, the home of Mr. and Mrs. Tony Wendice. Tony (Ray Milland) is a former tennis star, now forced to work for a living at something other than his sport. He's not used to working, but his wife has money so it doesn't much matter. In fact, he'd like to have all of his wife's money to himself; thus, he plots to kill her. You see, the wife, Margot (Grace Kelly), has long since lost interest in Tony, and, in fact, has fallen in love with another man, Mark Halliday (Robert Cummings), an American writer of television crime shows. Tony knows Margot is having an affair and is about to leave him, and the idea of fending for himself after she's gone is too much for him to take.
Tony's plan to murder his wife involves blackmailing an old acquaintance, a petty crook named Swan (Anthony Dawson), to do the dirty deed. And things almost come off. Almost. When they don't, when everything comes apart, Tony concocts another scheme, an even more brilliant and equally sinister one.
Milland is superb as the pampered, cultured, coolheaded scoundrel whose charm is hard for a viewer to resist. He's so cunning, so devious, so evil, yet so charismatic that you almost feel like rooting for him as the story unfolds. Kelly is her usual radiant self in this, her fourth film role, the part that would make her a star. Dawson is also good as the unscrupulous coconspirator, and John Williams, a Hitchcock stalwart, is the quintessential Scotland Yard Chief Inspector looking into the case. It's Cummings who's the weak link in the chain. He was a fine comedic actor, but I always found it hard to accept him in a dramatic role. He seemed forever to be smirking or on the brink of saying something that never came off. A more wooden and mechanical actor you could hardly find.
Since Hitchcock adapted a stage play, there are many instances when the story does, indeed, seem stagey and even stage bound; but Hitch keeps the pace moving at a good clip, and Milland's driving force as a most personable villain never fails to maintain our interest. Dimitri Tiomkin composed and conducted the musical score, which I found alternately melodramatic and intrusively sappy. However, while much of this music sounds more than a bit corny by today's standards, at least it doesn't boom raucously at us as the music does in so many modern thrillers.
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[release]13057[/release]