dial m for murder

Hitchcock Quickies

/ swampflix / 4 Comments

At the beginning of the year, I had three major projects in mind to guide my film-viewing for 2026. The first was to watch all of the films that had made Swampflix’s annual collaborative top-ten lists that I had not yet seen for myself (which resulted in the publications found here and here); the second was to watch and write about all of Ann Sothern’s Maisie films; and the third was to get the site to a place where all forty (give or take) of the thriller films directed by Alfred Hitchcock had some kind of coverage, in the lead up to an overall Hitchcock ranking. Because the uptown Prytania in New Orleans programs a great deal of classic Hitchcock, Brandon had already seen and reviewed many of them, but I still needed to watch (or re-watch) all of them in order to complete my “best Hitchcocks” list, which sometimes left me without an outlet to talk much about them, and we didn’t always agree. So, I’ve collected my thoughts on the Hitchcock films already covered by Swampflix below.

Suspicion (1941)

When compiling the document for us to keep track of what had and hadn’t already been covered, Suspicion was a film that I noted I hadn’t seen, because once you get into that period of Hitchcock’s work where he had a high density of films beginning with S— (Sabotage, Suspicion, Saboteur, Spellbound, Stage Fright), they tend to blur together somewhat. To my surprise, when I went to my notes in the margins of Douglas Brode’s Edge of Your Seat, I discovered that I had given this one a rating that was quite high, with no date associated. As I watched the film, I slowly began to recall the general outline of the plot, but I cannot for the life of me figure out how a younger, even less patient version of myself was able to get through this film in a single sitting, let alone enjoy it so much. In general, I find Hitchcock’s domestic dramas less interesting than his espionage plots. For every exhilarating Shadow of a Doubt, there’s a plodding I Confess. Suspicion is a film that I felt had a lot in common with Hitchcock’s very early work Number Seventeen, in that it’s repetitive and tiresome for most of its runtime, until it suddenly whips into gear in its final fifteen minutes. No wonder I forgot that I had already seen it; I can now vaguely recall a TCM screening that was so unmemorable that I had long ago assumed that images from it were things that I had dismissed as incorrect recollections of Notorious, most notably the scenes of Cary Grant in a poorly driven car.

Most viewers’ issues with Suspicion stem from what many considered to be a rushed, cop-out ending. Supposedly, the film was intended to end more like the book on which it was based, with Lina (Joan Fontaine)’s suspicions about her husband Johnnie (Grant)’s plans to murder being revealed to be well-founded. Apocryphally, Hitchcock lost a fight with the studio about this ending, as there were concerns that Grant’s performance as a murderous cad would tarnish his marketability as a leading man. I can say with certainty that this is not my issue with the film because the last-minute revelation that Johnnie is innocent in the deaths of his friend Beaky and was only picking the brain of a local Agatha Christie-esque mystery author to find a way to commit suicide is, in my interpretation, an utter fabrication. He was very clearly going to murder Lina, and his sudden apology for his behavior after all of his sinister machinations is yet another in a long line of Johnnie’s fibs that Lina naively falls for. After several rinse-and-repeat scenes of Johnnie being caught in a lie and then having to backtrack out of it, the audience has the understanding that no matter how many times Lina finds one of her family heirlooms at the antique store or someone stops her on the street to “Oh, honey,” her about the fact that her loser husband is not at work as he claims but is instead a frequent fixture at the race track, she’s just going to fall for it again. I don’t understand how the film’s final scene could be read any other way. She’s just getting back on the carousel again, and the next time Johnnie takes her on a dangerously fast coastal drive, he’s going to successfully push her out of the vehicle because she’ll be lulled into a false sense of security. This is not a happy ending by any stretch of the imagination, and that’s almost enough to save it, but not quite. The image of an enshadowed Grant summiting the stairs while carrying a possibly poisoned glass of milk is striking, but it comes far too late in a meandering plot to make much of a difference.

Saboteur (1942)

When we talked about The 39 Steps, one of the things that I mentioned was that ingesting so many Hitchcock films in rapid succession highlighted the fact that North by Northwest was assembled from various ideas, images, frameworks, iconography, and archetypes that he had been sharpening and honing for decades at that point in his career. Specifically, I cited that North by Northwest was all but a remake of 39 Steps in structure and character, with the Hitch staple of an innocent man on the run featuring a similar romantic entanglement and similar climactic finale taking place in a landmark location (although the director was using the last of these tropes as early as 1929’s Blackmail). As it turns out, there was (at least) one link in the chain of Hitchcock’s evolution of this concept that I hadn’t seen at that time, 1942’s Saboteur. In the midst of the U.S.’s involvement in WWII, a domestic terrorist sabotages a California aircraft manufacturing facility, and blame falls on factory worker Barry Kane (Robert Cummings), who goes looking for the real culprit based on a piece of mail that he saw the saboteur carrying. Just as in The 39 Steps, this results in our reluctant hero falling into the hands of a fascist-supporting man who takes advantage of his status as a well-respected member of the community, being forced to take a hostile woman hostage, escaping from police custody on a bridge, and even being forced into turning himself over to the antagonists when his love interest is threatened just when he has the opportunity to expose their nefarious deeds to a large audience. Presaging his eventual use of Six Grandfathers Mountain in North by Northwest, the film’s nail-biting climax takes place at the top of the Statue of Liberty.

What sets this one apart is both how jingoistic it is about America while remaining frank about and critical of its institutions. As always, Hitchcock’s police officer characters are inept, corrupt, and easily-duped, but the series of characters that Kane meets along the way who aren’t surreptitiously fascists are a broad spectrum of kindly strangers who help him evade detection and stay one step ahead of the police. Blind pianists, bearded ladies, long-haul truckers: they are all united in their belief in Kane’s innocence, and each independently contributes more to the successful capture of the titular saboteur than the combined efforts of the systems in place. The system itself is the enemy of the people, whether embodied in the wealthy—composed of coastal urban socialites and wealthy rural land men alike—or in the passive collaboration of a law enforcement which does the bidding of the wealthy and ignores the innocence of the common man. It’s interesting subtext, and although a lot of critics found the performance of Cummings as Kane underwhelming, I found myself rather taken with him in this film. Not as well remembered as either of the films that it serves as the link between, but an exceptional picture nonetheless.

Stage Fright (1950)

One of the many unintended tragic consequences of the “improvement” of search engines over time is that the recommendations for related searches can sometimes pop up and spoil something for you before you get the chance to get to what you were trying to find. This film is not often in discussion as a major work in Hitchcock’s canon, despite the fact that it’s quite good, and is instead only remembered as one of the films that featured an element that Hitchcock regretted. I won’t get into what or why (I’m kinder to you that the Google landing page in that way), but I will say that, just as the director was strongarmed into feigning apologizing for the shocking act of violence that is (for many) the most memorable thing about Sabotage, the public “I’m sorry” that Hitchcock made in later years for breaking the audience’s trust by subverting a narrative convention here should never have come to be. It’s an artist’s job to challenge the observer, and although the outcry from the masses in response to one of this film’s twists must have weighed heavily on his mind for many years, Hitchcock didn’t owe us an apology. Even as early as 1950, the audience presumed that they came to a Hitchcock picture with the expectation that they would be shocked, surprised, and entertained, and they got what they paid for. When I hear about the people who whined about Hitchcock “breaking their trust,” they all look like Annie Wilkes in my mind’s eye.

Dial M for Murder (1954)

This is an oddity in the Hitchcock film canon for a few reasons. Firstly, a lot of the man’s films are either sprawling odysseys that take a character from London to the Highlands or from Madison Avenue to Six Grandfathers Mountain, while he drew attention to his “limited setting” pictures (namely Lifeboat, Rope, and Rear Window) by confining their location. Dial M for Murder is often left out of discussions of the latter, largely because it isn’t confined to precisely one location, but it is noteworthy in that it’s limited to no more than three sets and some rear-projected street scenes. Despite this, it doesn’t do any of the fancy camera work that Rear Window did (that same year, no less). Even when a character is facing trial for a murder, instead of the standard courtroom scene, we get a more expressionistic image of said character standing before a colorful void that reflects their inner turmoil while the charges are read and the sentence is pronounced, all in barely a minute of screentime. It further differentiates itself from the larger repertoire in that, when Hitchcock followed a traditional mystery structure, he usually stuck to the age-old whodunit scaffolding. Dial M for Murder is a howcatchem (like Columbo or Poker Face) feature and it was released theatrically (in 3D!), it more neatly intersects with the television program Alfred Hitchcock Presents. The anthology series began airing the year after this film was released and continued for a total of ten seasons (with the last three featuring episodes of an hour in length rather than the thirty minutes they had spanned in previous years, much to the detriment of the renamed Alfred Hitchcock Hour). Hitch didn’t direct every episode himself, of course (in total, he directed 18 of 361), but the series did have a symbiotic relationship with his film career. The most obvious impact came with Psycho, which Hitchcock shot quickly between seasons of the show and using the show’s crew, which is why it was his first film since Strangers on a Train to be shot in black and white instead of color (other than The Wrong Man, where the monochrome nature is deliberate due to the movie’s docudrama nature). When he did direct episodes of the show, Hitchcock would use the show’s resources to work on proofs of concept for his features, essentially treating the series as an incubator for test runs of certain techniques. The season-two episode “One More Mile to Go” is perhaps the most apparent in this respect, as one can draw a direct visual line from that episode’s use of a dashboard point of view of a traffic stop and the sequence in Psycho where Marion Crane is pulled over by a motorcycle cop. This film also features an appearance from John Williams, who appeared in eight separate Hitchcock Presents narratives (one of which was a three-parter, so he technically was in ten episodes), many of them Hitchcock-directed installments, which goes to show how much the two got along.

This is a lot of information about the technical elements of the movie and where it fits into the oeuvre, which overlooks that, on the whole, this is a delightful little reverse mystery. Ray Milland, the man with the x-ray eyes himself, discovers that his wife (Grace Kelly) has been having an affair with a handsome young tennis star (Robert Cummings) and sets out to have her murdered, but when she manages to kill her would-be-killer in self-defense, he allows her to go to trial for murder, hoping that the justice system will solve all his problems. Small scale and domestic, but still quite good.

To Catch a Thief (1955)

Retired catburglar and jewel thief John Robie (Cary Grant), alias “The Cat,” lives a life of quiet leisure in a French villa, having been paroled for his work in the French Resistance during WWII. When a string of high profile jewelry burglaries is reported along the French Riviera, Robie knows that he’ll be questioned, and fears the loss of his reputation as a reformed man. When investigators do come for him, Robie escapes and makes his way to the restaurant of his friend Bertani, whose staff consists almost entirely of the old gang of thieves, all making an attempt at an honest life. Bertani directs the daughter of the restaurant’s wine steward to take Robie by boat and drop him off at a nearby beach club. Unbeknownst to him, it’s here that he’s first noticed by Frances Stevens (Grace Kelly), an American traveling with her nouveau riche mother, Jessie (Jessie Royce Landis). Robie also encounters a man named Hughson (John Williams again), an insurance specialist with Lloyd’s of London, who is in the area due to many of the recent thefts having been insured by his employer. Reluctantly, he agrees to help Robie try to find the copycat “Cat” by providing information about another set of insured clients in the area, which just so happens to include Mrs. Stevens and her daughter.

I watched this one shortly after seeing both the striking The Lady Vanishes and the non-Hitchcock noir classic Dark Passage, and it couldn’t help but feel a little lackluster in comparison. Reportedly, Hitchcock decided to direct this picture because he wanted to take a vacation in France, and if that’s true, I’d have to admit that it shows. There are glorious, lovely sweeping vistas throughout, but there’s nothing in the film with the inspiration of, say, the zoom in from across a great chessboard-tiled entry hall to a tiny key in someone’s hand in Notorious. When Hitchcock pulls out one of his trademarks, like a climactic rooftop scene at the end, it feels less like he’s playing the hits and more like he’s spinning his wheels. Kelly is magnetic as always, but Grant fails to inspire.

Psycho (1960)

What is there left to say about Psycho? It’s one of the greatest films of all time? That it’s full of unexpected twists and turns that were so famous that they’re no longer unexpected? It was so iconoclastic that it became iconic? My most recent rewatch (of many) was at a repertory screening at my local megaplex, accompanied by a younger friend who had no concept of what the movie was beyond obliquely recognizing the title, but he had some sense of what was going to happen because of his familiarity with the AMC prequel series Bates Motel; there’s something about horseshoe theory and pop cultural penetration to be mined from that, I’m sure. Sixty-six years later, the score is still so iconic that it was used in Primetime. It’s Psycho. You already know everything there is to know about it.

The Birds (1963)

The Birds is my mom’s favorite Hitchcock, but I still never managed to see it until I was an adult. It’s hard to describe the film without sounding like you’re talking about a B-grade schlocky horror, because in many ways, it is one, but like Psycho before it, it was also a genre definer. Tippi Hedren is a socialite who has risen to notoriety after a practical joke got out of hand and resulted in a widely publicized court appearance. She has a meet-cute with a handsome lawyer who is trying to buy a couple of lovebirds for his sister’s eleventh birthday. Hedren, believing that she’s in a romcom, buys the birds and tracks him down to Bodega Bay, where she learns that her new love interest has an overbearing mother (Jessica Tandy) who ruins all of her son’s potential relationships. Were it not for the ominous lack of sound (other than cawing corvids) that played over the film’s opening credits, one could mistake this for any other period romantic comedy, right down to Hedren’s character being a comically bad “woman driver” and her getting a mild injury (via divebombing seagull) that her love interest can tenderly tend. Other than a typically an offhand mention of the lawyer’s mother’s chickens refusing to eat, nothing seems truly amiss until the birds turn on mankind in full force, and we’re suddenly in a very different kind of movie.

(Tippi Hedren is iconic in this part. I remember commercial parodies of her taking refuge in a phone booth airing well into early aughts, and we probably only stopped seeing them because those are a thing that don’t exist anymore; and that didn’t stop a bird figurine based on her from selling out just two years ago.)

The Birds is not as shocking a swerve as the mid-film shake-up of Psycho, but the shot of one of the residents of the small town being discovered with his eyes completely pecked out is a major departure from an otherwise charming story so far, and things only get more exciting from there. There’s a scene in the diner in town that feels like it became a direct inspiration for so many similar tableaux in a great many of Stephen King’s works, where the residents of a coastal village argue and turn on one another when faced with some external evil force. All hell breaks loose moments later when a man gassing up his car is attacked by the birds, causing him to spill a trail of gasoline that ignites and sets off chaos. The final twenty minutes feature an all-out attack on the farmhouse by screeching fowl, and it’s terrifying. A master lesson in classing up a schlocky idea.

Frenzy (1972)

Not just a bad movie because it’s ugly, cruel, and nasty (although it certainly is all of those things), Frenzy is a film that I can’t help but detest for the shadow that it casts over the rest of Hitchcock’s career. Gone are the subtleties and nuances with regards to sex and violence. Instead of the provocative image of stockings being dried near a fireplace in The 39 Steps or fireworks going off over the water outside of a hotel window when Cary Grant and Grace Kelly kiss in To Catch a Thief, we get a graphic rape sequence. In place of the implication of violence in Psycho, where we never actually see a knife penetrating flesh, but the sequence tricks you into thinking you have, we witness stomach-churning violence. When the ending of North by Northwest was considered too risqué for its implication that Grant and Eva Marie Saint are about to consummate their marriage, Hitchcock cheekily thumbed his nose at the censor board by ending the film on the metaphorically graphic image of a train entering a tunnel. Frenzy shows the director in a different moral era, one in which he can get away with more salacious and explicit images and content, and he goes full bore into it at the end of his career.

Frenzy raises the question of whether or not all of the sly playfulness and clever directorial handiwork in Hitchcock’s oeuvre would have existed if he hadn’t had to outwit and circumnavigate contemporary censorship, ratings boards, and public sentiment. We remember Hitchcock as a master of the discipline because of the subtleties of his work, his deft hand at misleading you via cinematic trickery into thinking you’ve seen something that you didn’t, his impudent impishness at pushing the envelope. Even at the height of his career and amidst nigh-universal acclaim for his work during his golden era, Hitchcock had to be cleverer than the people who could (and would) try to stop his vision, and that made him sharper as a filmmaker. Frenzy’s very existence implies that, with those strictures loosened, an unbridled Hitchcock is craven, schlocky, and base. This is the film that fans the flames of those who argue Hitch was a misogynistic asshole. If there was nothing else left of his body of work but Frenzy, there could be no counterclaim.

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Dial M for Murder (1954)

/ swampflix / 5 Comments

In narrative terms, the 1954 crime thriller Dial M for Murder isn’t much of an outlier in director Alfred Hitchcock’s career. If anything, it’s a useful timesaver for anyone looking for an overview crash course in Classic Hitchcock storytelling, as it effectively plays like what would happen if Strangers on a Train was retold within the stage-play limitations of Rope. Both of those preceding Hitch classics are hypothetical plottings of The Perfect Murder, which inevitably go awry in execution, leading to the murderer’s demise. The premeditated killer in this case (Ray “X-Ray Eyes” Milland) blackmails an old college classmate into killing his adulterous wife (Grace “Princess of Monaco” Kelly) as a lucrative act of marital revenge. The story is mostly contained in a single living room set and is rigidly sectioned into three dramatic acts: the opening act in which the killer explains the scheme to his accomplice, one in which the accomplice fails in his mission mid-strangling, and a final act of Columbo-style “howcatchem” investigation that puts the pieces of the puzzle back together through the nosy inquiries of an unassuming detective (John “Comic Relief” Williams). It’s all very tidy & succinct, possibly owing to the fact that Hitchcock was planning the much more elaborate production of Rear Window while going through the motions of adapting this morbid little stage play.

The surprising thing about Dial M for Murder is that its stage-bound telling doesn’t convey Hitchcock’s visual artistry, which is usually foregrounded as a knack for special effects dazzlement. At least, that’s what I thought when I first left the theater. At the start of the local screening of Dial M in The Prytania’s Classic Movies series, I was disappointed in the quality of the film scan, which appeared to be a fuzzy SD transfer from an ancient DVD print. Then, when Grace Kelly appears onscreen in the first interior scene, her gorgeous face & gowns were suddenly in sharp focus, as if someone had flipped on the HD-quality light switch. The initial fuzziness then periodically returned in a few exterior shots, which appeared to be partially composited or greenscreened for no practical, discernible reason. It turns out, of course, that this alternating visual quality was a result of the film being shot for 3D processing, then later retrofitted into a 2D print. It was produced in the brief early-50s window when the classic red-and-blue 3D glasses presentation was a popular fad, but the novelty of the effect had worn off by the time Dial M hit theaters, and the prints were descaled to a measly two dimensions halfway into its run. As Hitchcock bitterly acknowledged, 3D was “a nine-day wonder, and [he] came in on the ninth day,” making for one of the rare times when he was a latecomer instead of an innovator in visual effects.

The Prytania’s Sunday-morning Classic Movies slot is a reliably wonderful way to catch up on any Old Hollywood mainstays that might be personal blindspots, and Hitchcock’s catalog has long been the backbone of that program. Since the single-screen theater is over a century old, it feels like time-traveling back to the classic films’ initial release, when they likely screened in that very theater. That effect was especially potent for their most recent screening of Dial M for Murder, which was preceded by a classic Looney Tunes short instead of trailers for upcoming attractions (the Hitchcock-spoofing Tweety Bird short “The Last Hungry Cat,” for anyone curious). Part of me wishes that they could have presented the film in its original 3D format, glasses and all, for maximum time-travel novelty. The truth is, though, that Dial M‘s 3D format was very quickly rejected by contemporary audiences, so that most people did see it screened in its confused & compromised 2D form, making my experience with the film authentic to its initial run. To the theater’s credit, they will also be screening William Castle’s 13 Ghosts in its original “Illusion-O” presentation this October, which was Castle’s personally branded 3D gimmick. There’s something beautiful about the fact that Castle’s own special-effects artistry is still chasing after its classier Hitchcock equivalents all these decades later, sometimes in the exact venues where they started their one-sided feud.

While learning about Dial M for Murder‘s retracted 3D tech after leaving the theater did help make sense of why its exterior & effects shots looked so bizarrely hazy, I still can’t figure out why Hitchcock would choose to give such a stage-bound story that treatment in the first place. The beauty of Dial M is in its narrative simplicity. By the final act, the nosy detective’s post-murder puzzle solving mostly comes down to three isolated pieces of evidence: a key, a letter, and a silk stocking. Those three pieces are moved around the puzzle board through verbal speculation, with most of the visual spectacle resulting from Grace Kelly’s elegant beauty and Ray Milland’s dastardly performance as a smug drip who hates his elegantly beautiful wife. Even so, Hitchcock finds small moments for visual extravagance, such as the husband’s explanation of how the murder should go down being framed in a high-angle shot from the ceiling’s POV, as if he and the killer were pieces on a board game. The only moments I can recall that may have benefited from the original 3D effect are the isolated shot of the contract killer reaching his hands out to strangle Kelly as she answers a phone call and the surreal shot of Kelly later answering to a judicial panel as if she were being tried for murder in the courts of Hell. Those few seconds of screentime are not worth filtering the rest of the picture through the 3D process, especially since it mostly consists of lengthy conversations in a single parlor.

It’s a testament to the strength of the stage-play source material and Hitchcock’s ability to wind up tension in his audience that Dial M is still solidly entertaining despite all of the needless distractions of its 3D processing. The Prytania’s Classic Movies crowd was an especially robust turnout that Sunday morning, likely owing to the director’s name recognition. Hitchcock always delivers, apparently even when working on autopilot.

-Brandon Ledet