A fateful phone call in Dial M for Murder
Chris Forrester delves into a trio of Alfred Hitchcock’s macabre masterpieces and the careful plotting — and unraveling — of their characters’ homicidal desires.
Only a handful of filmmakers have remade their own films (Michael Haneke with Funny Games, George Sluizer with The Vanishing, Olivier Assayas with Irma Vep, Michael Mann with L.A. Takedown/Heat, John Woo’s The Killer, Hideaki Anno’s remixes of his work on Neon Genesis Evangelion), fewer still with much success (of the above, Haneke, Assayas, Mann). Among them, one might put forth Alfred Hitchcock for his 1934 original and 1956 remake of The Man Who Knew Too Much, about the kidnapping of a family’s son after their witnessing of an assassination. It’s the most straightforward iteration of the famously obsessive director’s tendency to rework the same plot concepts, tropes, and setpieces across his body of work, tinkering, refining, expanding as his technique sharpened, budgetary constraints dissipated, and audiences grew. The scrappy British Hitchcock of 1929, purveyor of lean genre thrill rides, put forth an action sequence involving a large sculpture of a head in the British Museum at the climax of Blackmail; the budding Hollywood success Hitchcock of 1942 expanded it into a white-knuckled showdown on the Statue of Liberty’s aspiring torch with Saboteur (not to be confused with his 1936 Sabotage); and the Master of Suspense Hitchcock of 1959 restaged it in vivid Technicolor as a simultaneous suspense spectacle and romantic climax at the close of North by Northwest.
A culmination of multiple such throughlines, North by Northwest is perhaps also the finest (and final) of the director’s “wrong man” movies, in which innocent or ordinary men are mistaken for spies (The 39 Steps, Saboteur) or criminals (The Wrong Man, Young and Innocent) and forced on the run. Another throughline, more obvious but no less obsessively tinkered with: the logistics of murder conspiracy — from planning through orchestration and disposal — and its emotional fallout. To invoke one of the more famous entries in this oeuvre-within-an-oeuvre, roping in every film Hitchcock made that involves murder casts too wide a net; refine one’s focus to include the ones that make murderous schemes and carefully concocted cover-ups a central point and the nature of his obsessions come into focus.
Take, for example, Rope (1948), Strangers on a Train (1951), and Dial M for Murder (1954), all of which on some level expand the mechanics of their respective crimes into a focal point that equals (or factors significantly into) other characters’ solving of the crime, and ultimately chart the dissolution of those finely oiled schemes into sweaty, quivering reckonings with guilt. The basics: in Rope, a pair of men host a dinner party with the freshly strangled corpse of a would-be guest hidden in the apartment; in Strangers on a Train, a chance meeting leads a pair of strangers to believe they’ve concocted a foolproof plan in the form of a murder swap that will leave neither a reasonable suspect of his respective crime; in Dial M for Murder, a retired tennis player plots to murder his unfaithful wife so as to be rid of her but keep her fortune.
No stranger to letting his own perversities shine with blind(blonde?)ing intensity and of course a noted obsessive whose propensity for Getting It Right occasionally spilled over into outright torment, Hitchcock’s plotting in each of the four films’ schemes are all masterpieces of conception and translation. Where the murder of Rope is a simple strangling, it’s just the appetizer to a feast of diabolical taunts and close calls that sees the corpse shut inside an unlocked chest that’s been repurposed into a dining table and its killers waxing obvious about the Nietzschean concepts that might permit murder for a select few. In Strangers on a Train, a similarly perfect-on-paper-but-less-so-in-practice scheme falls apart when its originator commits his murder and his partner in crime chickens out; more spectacular even than the devilishly satisfying idea of the murder swap is the fateful domino chain that casts suspicion on him anyways. Afraid to dirty his hands but greedy enough to want his wife dead and his bank account loaded anyways, the schemer in Dial M for Murder ensnares a small-time crook in a blackmail scheme in order to force him to commit the murder.
Many of Hitchcock’s most famous films are striking for the glimmers of their maker’s fetishism and diabolic imagination that poke through the Production Code-era Hollywood studio sheen, and while no Psycho or Marnie, these three encompass a great deal of what made his suspense pictures so memorable. There’s a dual undercurrent of tension and glee to the sadistic dinner party in Rope and the bungled schemes of Strangers on a Train and Dial M for Murder that becomes only more pronounced as things unravel and the characters are forced to act on pure impulse; we’re left uncertain of whether to be relieved or distressed the respective conspirators haven’t succeeded.
A guilty conscience finds sinister omens everywhere: Strangers on a Train (1951)
Of similar but varying significance is the fallout. Only one of these three murders goes off without a hitch, the other two falling to pieces before their marks can be merked, and all three are doomed from the moment of their inception. In keeping with the films’ almost schematic observations of their various criminal hijinks, Hitchcock casts their inevitable disarray in similarly expansive focus. All three plots involve co-conspirators of contrasting enthusiasm, and in all three cases, one participant’s emotional or practical shortcomings attract disastrous suspicion.
Moreover, that fallout is articulated within a unique genre framework each time: Rope, the one-act-play-as-movie, fashions it as dramatic pressure cooker; Strangers on a Train maps it to the contours of the police investigation procedural that unfolds after the first murder; and Dial M for Murder makes a grand confrontation out of the miniature courtroom drama that ensues from a misidentification of the murderer. Thus, though the psychological motivator of the guilty man’s breakdown in each case is the inaction of his inability to atone for his actions without dire personal consequences, Hitchcock is able to dramatize it via the action of these culminating passages. Much as these are films about committing the ultimate crime where the exacting perfection of Hitchcock’s suspense set pieces aligns the viewer, however begrudgingly, with the killers in white-knuckling at the first signs of a snag, they’re also about the inevitability of guilt on behalf of the perpetrators, and his success in catching us up in the satisfaction of watching their schemes click and clack toward completion grows thorns as we inevitably despair at the protagonists’ inability to commit the perfect crime.
Lighting in the apartment becomes dramatic as suspicions climb: Rope (1948)
Spoken or unspoken as the actual phrase is in each case, one might classify the three films as a “perfect murder” trilogy about both the allure of the concept and the inevitable realization that there’s no such thing. And more than in many other cases of Hitchcock’s perfectionist reworkings of the same ideas, the yield is similar each time; each film is notable for its own successes and commendable on its own terms — Rope for its slithering camerawork and expressive set design, Strangers on a Train for its first-rate thrills and cascade of finely articulated consequence and misfortune, and Dial M for Murder for a striking use of color and innovative, shapeshifting structure (and, for the lucky viewer, its release in polarized 3D).
Dial M for Murder screens in 3D at IU Cinema on Friday, August 29, at 7pm. Dial here for tickets.