Dial M for Murder (1954) is a thriller film directed by Alfred Hitchcock starring Grace Kelly, Ray Milland and Robert Cummings and released by Warner Brothers. The film was based on the almost identical stage play of the same title by English 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 in June, and then Broadway in October). The screenplay was written by Knott, who moved to the U.S. in 1954 and wrote only one other well-known play, Wait Until Dark (1966), which was filmed a year later. He also wrote a lesser-known play, Write Me a Murder (1961), which ran for 196 performances at Belasco Theater. Knott's work tends to focus on women who innocently become the potential victims of sinister plots. There is just one setting in the stage play of Dial M for Murder : the living-room of the Wendices' flat in London (61A Charrington Gardens, Maida Vale). Hitchcock's film adds a second setting in a gentleman's club, a few views of the street outside and a stylized courtroom montage. Having seen the play on Broadway, Cary Grant was keen to play the role of Tony Wendice, but studio chiefs did not feel the public would accept him as a man who arranges to have his wife murdered. In June 2008, the American Film Institute revealed its "Ten Top Ten" — the best ten films in ten "classic" American film genres — after polling over 1,500 people from the creative community. Dial M for Murder was ranked the ninth best film in the mystery genre in the AFI's list. [1]

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Plot

Tony Wendice (Ray Milland) is a former tennis player who married Margot (Grace Kelly) partly for her money. To please his wife, he has given up tennis and now sells sports equipment. Margot once had a relationship with Mark Halliday (Robert Cummings), an American crime scriptwriter, but broke it off when he went back to the U.S. for a year. In time they stopped writing to each other, and when Mark returns to London she tells him that she burned all his letters but one.

Tony and Margot have made their wills, naming each other as beneficiary. For a year, Tony meticulously plans Margot's murder. She has no idea that Tony knows of her love for Mark. He has gone to great lengths to steal a 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 to have it back. (She did, but he asked for only £50 and she did not, of course, get the letter back.) 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 (£1) notes, with which he plans to pay a contract killer. He singles out the perfect man to do the job: Charles Alexander Swann (Anthony Dawson), who now calls himself "Captain Lesgate", a former acquaintance who has embarked on a life of petty crime since even before leaving Cambridge where he and Tony were both students. By following him and finding out about his past and associations, Tony soon gets enough to blackmail Swann into murdering his wife.



Tony uses the opportunity of Mark's return to London to carry out his plan. Under a pretext—he has to prepare an urgent report for his boss—he has Margot and Mark go to the theatre and, when they are gone, he invites Swann to his flat under another pretext—wanting to buy an expensive car from him. When Swann arrives at 61A Charrington Gardens that night, Tony gets down to business. There is no time to lose, as he has planned the murder for the following night. Trapped in a corner by the revelations of his past crimes and tempted by the money, Swann agrees.

Tony has invited Mark to join him at a 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 Margot, that he panicked, 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. so that Margot will come to the living-room to answer the phone, whereupon 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 Margot'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 Margot, 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. Margot 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 Margot 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 Margot turns out to be rather strong and eventually stabs Swann in the back with the scissors. He falls backwards to the floor, right onto the scissors, 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.

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 Margot had been blackmailed by Swann, that he 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-defense). After calling the police and sending Margot back to bed, he plants Mark's letter on Swann (to make it appear that he was the one who sent blackmail letters to Margot), finds the latch key on Swann and puts it back in Margot's handbag, and burns the scarf that Swann used, replacing it with one of Margot's stockings. He hides the twin stocking on the desk, but intentionally "accidentally" uncovers it for the police to find (making it look as though Margot inflicted the bruises by herself). Finally, Tony tells Margot to deny that he told her not to call the police. Although he tells her that it will lessen the police suspicion, it has the opposite effect, making it appear as though she avoided calling the police.

Eventually, the police establish that Swann came in through the hall door rather than the French windows leading into the garden, as his shoes are not dirty. After an intermission, we are introduced to Inspector Hubbard, who questions the Wendices and appears to believe the evidence that Tony planted, eventually becoming highly suspicious of Margot. The movie cuts immediately to the trial scene where she is convicted and sentenced to be hanged, thus accomplishing Tony's plan after all.

However, there are two things Tony has not reckoned with: (a) that Swann replaced the key under the stair carpet immediately after using it to open the door and, accordingly, the key he 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 and bound to be investigated by the police (which it is, although Tony is not aware of this).

On the day before Margot'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. Coincidentally, Mark has come up with exactly what Tony actually did. Mark argues that during Margot'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) Margot'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, purportedly 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 Margot had ready when she met Swann but that she changed her mind and killed him instead of paying him off. The inspector accepts this explanation and dismisses Mark's theory, or so it seems.

In fact, the inspector, who has not given up the case yet, remains suspicious of Tony and sets a trap. He borrows the key from Margot's handbag — which is kept in prison — and goes to Tony's flat while Tony is not home. He finds that it does not fit the lock. He discovers that the key actually fits Swann's door. After some searching he discovers the actual key under the carpet.

Then the inspector uses his final trick. He visits Tony to ask some questions and when he leaves he deliberately takes Tony's raincoat instead of his own. (The raincoats are apparently very similar and so are the keys.) Tony also leaves his flat. Inspector Hubbard secretly enters the flat, using the key from the raincoat, telephones the prison and asks that Margot be released. Margot, who does not understand why she has been released, goes home, and finds that the key in her handbag does not fit the lock. Hubbard waits some time, he wants to find out whether she knows the hiding place under the stair carpet. She does not, so that clears her of any suspicion. The inspector opens the door for her. Hubbard tells a colleague to take the handbag back to the police station. Hubbard and Margot then wait for Tony's homecoming.

When Tony comes home he realizes that he cannot get inside: he is wearing Hubbard's raincoat with Hubbard's key. Hubbard and Margot hide themselves inside and do not open the door. Then Tony remembers that he had been told to collect Margot's belongings from the police station, so he goes there to fetch her handbag, with the key. When he comes home he finds that the key from Margot's handbag — actually Swann's — does not fit into the lock. Tony starts thinking what could have happened. When he takes the key from under the stair carpet he gives himself away.

Tony enters the room to find Margot and the inspector, and Mark too. 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.

Cinematography

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 Margot, there are no props (only various colored lights), and the various people present at a trial are only introduced by means of voice-overs. Margot 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 (Lifeboat , 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).

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.

3D film version

The 1954 film was shot with M.L. Gunzberg's Natural Vision 3-D camera rig. This rig was notable for being the same rig that started the 3-D craze of 1953 with Bwana Devil and House of Wax . Intended originally to be shown in dual strip, polaroid 3-D, the film played most theaters flat due to the loss of interest in the 3-D process in conjunction with the time of its release. In February 1980, the dual-strip system was used for the revival of the film in 3-D at the York Theater in San Francisco. This revival did so well that Warner Brothers re-released the film in the single-strip system 3-D version in February 1982.

Similar films and remakes

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. In the end, the culprit turns out to be her own husband (Harrison), too. 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 U.S. 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: the husband (Douglas) hires his wife's lover (played by Viggo Mortensen) to kill her. However, a twist occurs when the lover sends a third party to kill the wife. The part of the inspector (David Suchet) is also much reduced, and it is Gwyneth Paltrow's character (as the wife) who unravels much of the mystery.

The character played by Robert Cummings of TV crime writer Mark Halliday, was originally called "Max Halliday" in the stage play. In the 1956 US TV series Alfred Hitchcock Presents there is an episode called "Portrait of Jocelyn" that features a man called Mark Halliday, who murders his wife.

The film was remade in Bollywood as Aitbaar (1985), starring Raj Babbar, Dimple Kapadia and Suresh Oberoi. Yet another Bollywood film, Humraaz (2002), starring Bobby Deol, Akshaye Khanna and Amisha Patel, is inspired by both this film as well as A Perfect Murder .

UK Based Vertigo Theatre Productions updated the classic thriller in 2009 changing its name to 'M' and replacing the husband and wife set up with a brother and sister. The action was moved to a wealthy district of New York and was billed as a 'Teen Thriller'. The play was written by Craig Hepworth and Adele Stanhope.

Alternate titles

• Le Crime était presque parfait - French title - (translation: The Crime Was Almost Perfect )
• Telefonen Ringer Klokken 23 - Danish title - (translation: The Phone Rings at 11pm )
• Bei Anruf Mord - German title - (translation: Murder on Call )
• Crimen perfecto - Spanish title - (translation: Perfect Crime )
• Disque M para Matar - Brazil title - (tranlation: Dial M to Kill )
• Gyilkosság telefonhívásra - Hungarian title - (tranlation: Murder for a Phonecall )
• Alibi - Hebrew title

References

1. AFI's 10 Top 10