Dial M For Murder
Year: 1954
Director: Alfred Hitchcock
Cast: Ray Milland, Grace Kelly
Often regarded as the best film-maker ever, Alfred Hitchcock had a strange fascination for making movies in confined spaces. If he did that successfully in films like Rope and Rear Window, then Dial M For Murder was also no exception. Taking a successful play by the same name, making the same writer (Frederick Knott) work on the film-script and then practically shooting the entire film in the same apartment, Hitchcock created yet another crime classic.
True to Hitchcockian style, Dial M For Murder grabs you by the throat from the very beginning and then doesn’t loosen that grip till the end. The story is about a mismatched couple, a rich wife Margot (Grace Kelly) and her ex-tennis-star husband Tony (Ray Milland). While Margot is trying to let go of her affair with an American writer Mark (Robert Cummings), Tony is busy devising the perfect murder of his wife.
To achieve his aim, Tony, a cool calculated manipulator, calls upon Swann (Anthony Dawson), an old acquaintance with a penchant for shady deals and smoothly coaxes, nee blackmails him to accept the role of a killer.
Tony’s plan is almost perfect. Everything is well thought out, every detail meticulously laid out. But there is many a slip between the cup and the lip. The murder plan goes horribly awry. But wily Tony even uses that situation to his advantage. What happens in the end?
The beauty of this film is that the villain is spelt out right in the beginning and yet, that doesn’t take away anything from the suspense. The confined settings don’t hinder the film- in fact, they enhance the film’s appeal by sharply focusing the audience-attention on the on-going cat-and-mouse game.
Kelly is arresting as the wife in the eye of the storm, while Milland’s performance as the suave smooth-talking villain is a gem.
As usual, Hitchcock’s amazing ability to tap the moral ambiguity of human nature- (We are almost caught rooting for the villain!)- and his tremendous cinematic craft of telling a sequence worth a 1000 words through a single fleeting shot, are evident time and again. The murder sequence is one of the most chilling ones, without being gory.
Released in 1954, Dial M For Murder was released as a 3-D film, a craze that died down over the years. Years later, in 1998, the same plot was rehashed and made into the film A Perfect Murder starring Michael Douglas and Gwyneth Paltrow. But of course, the original proved to be much superior to the successor!
Kesariya Balam
