Dial M for Murder (film)
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Dial M for Murder is a 1954 Warner Brothers film directed by Alfred Hitchcock starring Grace Kelly and Ray Milland as a married couple. It is based on the stage play of the same title by playwright Frederick Knott (1916-2002). Dial M for Murder premiered in 1952 as a BBC television play before being performed on the stage in the same year (West End, June; Broadway, October.)
The screenplay for the film was written by Knott himself and is
almost identical to the stage play (Samuel French acting edition ISBN 0-573-01102-8).
Knott, who moved to the U.S.A. in 1954, wrote only one other well-known play,
Wait Until Dark (1966), which was filmed in 1967. Generally, Knott's work tends
to focus on women who innocently become the focus, and the potential victims,
of evil plots.
Dial M for Murder is sometimes confused with a film with a similar setting and subject matter, Midnight Lace (US David Miller, 1960), starring Rex Harrison and Doris Day. In this film, a woman (Day) receives harassing telephone calls that escalate until she is in physical danger. There is also a police inspector around (in both cases played by John Williams), and the setting is also very British.
One of the classic examples of a stage thriller, it has been revived a number of times since, including a US TV movie in 1981 with Angie Dickinson and Christopher Plummer.
A Perfect Murder is
a 1998 remake directed by Andrew Davis and starring Michael Douglas and Gwyneth
Paltrow in which the characters of Halliday and Lesgate are combined.
Having
seen the play on Broadway, Cary Grant was keen to play the role of Tony Wendice
but studio chiefs didn't think the public would accept him.
The role played
by Robert Cummings of TV crime writer Mark Halliday had originally been called
Max Halliday in the stage play..
Alfred Hitchcock's cameo is a signature occurrence
in most of his films. In Dial M for Murder he can be seen (13 minutes into the
film) in a black-and-white reunion photograph sitting at a banquet table among
former students and faculty.
Cast
Ray Milland
- Tony Wendice
Grace Kelly - Margot Mary Wendice
Robert Cummings - Mark Halliday
John Williams - Chief Insp. Hubbard
Anthony Dawson - Charles Alexander Swann aka Captain Lesgate
Leo Britt -
The Storyteller
Patrick Allen - Det. Pearson
George Leigh - Det. Williams
George Alderson - Detective #1
Robin Hughes - Police sergeant
Plot
Tony Wendice (Ray Milland) is a former tennis player who married Sheila (called Margot in the movie) (Grace Kelly)partly for her money. To please his wife, he has given up tennis and now has a job selling sports equipment. Sheila had a relationship with Mark Halliday (Robert Cummings), a crime writer for American TV, but they broke it off when Mark went to the U.S. for a year. Eventually, they also stopped writing to each other.
Tony and Sheila have both made their wills, naming each other as beneficiary. For one year, Tony meticulously plans Sheila's murder. Sheila has no idea that Tony knows about her love for Mark. He went to great lengths to steal her handbag containing one of Mark's letters, and even assumed the role of an anonymous Brixton-based blackmailer to find out whether she would pay for the retrieval of the letter (She did, but he asked for only £50). He even watched them having a little farewell party (eating spaghetti with mushrooms) in Mark's studio flat in Chelsea.
Tony slyly withdraws small amounts of money for a year, collecting £1,000 in (used) one-pound notes, with which he plans to pay a contract killer. He also singles out the perfect man to do the job: C A Swann (Anthony Dawson), who now calls himself "Captain Lesgate", an old schoolmate of his who had embarked on a life of petty crime when they were students together. Tony knows that now he will be able to blackmail Swann into murdering his wife.
When the
action starts, Tony's careful preparations have been going on for a year. Now
he uses the opportunity of Mark's return to London to carry out his plan. Under
some pretext—he has to prepare an urgent report for his boss—he has
Sheila and Mark go to the theatre and, when they are gone, he invites Swann round
to his flat under another pretext—wanting to buy an expensive American car
from him. When Swann arrives at 61A Charrington Gardens that Friday night, Tony
gets down to business very quickly. There is no time to lose, as he has planned
the murder for the following night. Finally, Swann accepts the deal.
For Saturday night, Tony has invited Mark to join him at some stag party in a nearby hotel—this is how he secures himself an alibi. The idea is that the police should think that a burglar was surprised by Sheila, that he panicked, attacked and strangled her and left without the loot. He has told Swann that he is going to phone his own flat at exactly 11 p.m. Sheila will come to the living-room to answer the phone, and then she will be murdered by Swann. There are only two keys to the Wendices' ground floor flat. Before leaving for the stag party, Tony steals Sheila's key from her handbag and hides it under the stair carpet outside their flat for Swann to use.
Mark, a writer of crime scenarios, says at one point that, theoretically, he would be able to plan the perfect murder but that it would be impossible to carry out any plan of his because in real life people just do not act according to other people's plans. This is true of Sheila, too: Instead of listening to the radio in her bedroom when Tony and Mark are away, she tells her husband of her own plans to go to the cinema that night. Tony has a hard time persuading his wife to instead stay at home and stick into an album some old newspaper clippings of his when he was a tennis star. Sheila finally consents and for that reason takes a (seemingly) huge pair of scissors out of her mending basket (which also contains a pair of her stockings). When she has finished the tiresome job she goes to bed, carelessly leaving the scissors lying on the desk next to the phone. According to Tony's plan, Swann secretly enters the Wendices' flat shortly before 11 o'clock, hides behind the drawn curtains, a scarf in his hands, and waits for the telephone to ring and for Sheila to come out of her bedroom to answer it. When she does, the plan goes terribly wrong: Swann attacks her from behind—with Tony all the while listening in to what is going on over the phone—but Sheila turns out to be rather strong and eventually stabs Swann in the back with the scissors. He falls to the floor and is dead at once. In his panic, Tony tells his sobbing wife not to touch or do anything until he has come home, which he hurriedly does. After getting home, he calls the police.
Tony's mind has to work fast now if he wants to come up with an alternative plan. He realizes he can make it look as if Sheila had been blackmailed by Swann, that the blackmailer came to her flat in person and that she actually let him in with the intention of murdering him (rather than killing him in self-defence). By now it has been established that Swann came in through the hall door rather than the French windows leading into the garden, as his shoes are not dirty. This would mean that she will be hanged, and that he will inherit her money after all.
In the course of the police investigations, led by Inspector Hubbard (John Williams), Tony succeeds in cunningly and artfully planting clues in a way that gets his unsuspecting wife deeper and deeper into trouble. For one thing, he hides Swann's scarf (in the film, he burns it in the fireplace), replaces it with one of Sheila's stockings from her mending basket and hides the other stocking beneath the blotter on the desk. For another, before the police arrive at the scene of the crime, he puts Mark's letter into one of the inside pockets of the dead man's suit—which will go to show that he actually was blackmailing Sheila. Also, he extracts Sheila's key (he thinks) from one of Swann's pockets and puts it back into his wife's handbag. Soon Sheila is seen as the main suspect; she is arrested, tried, and sentenced to death.
There are two things Tony has not reckoned with: (a) that Swann replaced the key under the stair carpet immediately after using it rather than when leaving the flat again and that, accordingly, the key Tony takes out of the dead man's pocket is the key to Swann's own flat; and (b) that getting rid of £1,000 in cash (the money he would have paid to Swann, which he does not have to now that he is dead) by making many purchases is a conspicuous thing to do, bound to be investigated by the police. They do, but Tony is not aware of it.
On the day before Sheila's scheduled execution, Mark visits Tony to propose a very unusual thing to him. Rather than seeing his wife hanged, he could come up with a completely new story, confess at the last minute that he hired Swann to kill his wife and save her life by going to prison for some years himself instead. Ironically, Mark has come up with exactly what Tony actually did. Mark argues that during Sheila's trial, all arguments revolved around three things only: (1) Mark's letter found on Swann; (2) the fact that no key was found on Swann (and that there was no forced entry either); and (3) Sheila's stocking. Mark argues that all this could be altered, and that Tony could put all the blame on himself, claiming that it was he who had done all that.
Then Inspector Hubbard arrives at the flat again, allegedly to ask Tony about the money he has been spending lately. This is when Mark discovers Tony's attaché case filled with the remaining one pound notes. Pressed for an answer, Tony manages a final impromptu lie in front of both Mark and the police: He tells them this is the money Sheila had ready when she met Swann but that she changed her mind and killed him instead of paying him off.
Then the inspector, who has not given up the case yet but who pretends he has, uses his final trick: He says good-bye and deliberately takes Tony's raincoat instead of his own. Now Tony's key to the flat is in the pocket of his raincoat, so on returning to his flat some time later he realizes that he cannot get inside. He notices that he is wearing Hubbard's raincoat and goes off to the police station to exchange it. Meanwhile, Hubbard has brought Sheila to the flat. Her key—actually Swann's—does not fit into the lock, so she cannot open the door. What Hubbard wants to find out is if she knows the hiding place under the stair carpet. She does not, so that clears her of any suspicion. Some time later, Tony comes back. When he takes the key from under the stair carpet he gives himself away.
Tony enters the room to find Sheila, Mark, and the inspector. He realizes he's been found out and congratulates the inspector. He then offers everyone a drink, acting very casual, as tears begin to stream down his wife's face. The last scene is of the inspector, acting in a manner that shows he's proud of himself, as he combs his mustache.
A commentary on Dial M for Murder ascribed to Hitchcock goes like this: "As you can see, the best way to do it is with scissors." This refers at the same time to the film's pivotal scene, in which Grace Kelly stabs her would-be murderer with a pair of scissors, and to the clever editing which is a hallmark of his movies. One of the finest scenes is when we see Tony Wendice at the stag party, slightly nervous and frequently looking at his watch. It is already past eleven when he notices that it has stopped: He gets up from the table, hurries to the phone booth, has to wait there and eventually calls his flat well after 11 o'clock, at the very moment Lesgate is about to leave it again, believing that he has waited in vain. This is a miniature race against time full of dramatic music, complete with a cut to the automatic telephone exchange.
There is no real courtroom scene. This part of the film is done in a highly stylized way: The camera is on Sheila, there are no props (only colors), and the various people present at a trial are only introduced by means of voice-over. Sheila being sentenced to death is altogether missing from the stage play; it is only reported.
Apart from a few short outdoor shots—Tony Wendice approaching and leaving his flat etc.—the claustrophobic atmosphere of other Hitchcock films (Rope, Rear Window) can also be found here. Most of the action is restricted to a single set. The angle of the camera is also of interest (several times shot from the ceiling, a sort of bird's eye view).
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