Dial M for Murder

SPOILER ALERT! The plot will be discussed.

This post, as have others, comes out of a film class at the Bryn Mawr Film Institute. Since Alfred Hitchcock directed this 1954 film, I couldn’t help but want to write about it. The instructor was Dr. Andrew Owen of Cabrini College, and he focused on how the movie presents the discrepancy between the appearance of civility and compliance with accepted moral behavior, and the social transgressions by characters who try to hide their darker natures.

The story takes place in England, and the opening shot is of a “Bobby” being watchful over the street below the flat belonging to our main characters. It is a bit of an ironic image, since what will take place out of the sight of the policeman are unethical and illegal acts. (However, the police come off better here than in other Hitchcock films, where the authorities are usually incompetently seeking an innocent man, such as in The 39 Steps and North by Northwest).

The home of Tony Wendice (Ray Milland), and his wife, Margot (Grace Kelly), is well appointed and pleasing to look at. The first appearance of the two has Tony giving Margot a good morning kiss, a little bit of token affection, because it is required, with no passion, as Margot doesn’t even remove her hands from her morning newspaper. It appears staged, which is in reality what it is, being a movie based on a play. Tony looks well dressed as does his wife. There is no communication between them, no feeling of true intimacy, and they just exchange smiles that seem pasted on their faces. She is wearing conservative clothing in the brief shot. We then switch to the next scene where Margot has on a sexy red dress (which, as our instructor observed, is equivalent to her wearing “The Scarlet Letter”), as she is now in the arms of her secret lover, Mark Halliday (Robert Cummings). (Something similar occurs in Psycho, where Marion Crane’s underclothes change from white to black after she steals the money). So, the first shot of a seemingly content married couple was a fraud.

Margot tells Mark, an American who writes mysteries for television, that her husband has changed. He decided to end his professional tennis career so that he could stay home to be with her. She says she burned all of Mark’s love letters to her except one, which was stolen when her purse went missing at a train station, along with some money. The audience never learns the contents of the letter, except for a hint that it may have been very romantic. It is really just a tool to further the plot. Margot says she received a blackmail note from whoever stole the purse and the letter, and she paid out ￡50, but the money was not taken and she didn’t get the letter back. Margot originally wanted to tell Tony about her affair with Mark, and leave her husband for her lover, but she now seems ready to call that plan off.

We soon get a sniff that Tony has his own dirty secret plans. After Mark is introduced as a visiting acquaintance of Margot’s, Tony convinces the two to go out without him. He says he needs to work, which turns out not to be true. Tony, who always speaks politely even while he tells a lie, instead uses this private time to phone a person to buy a car. He says he wants the man to come to his flat because he sprained his ankle, which also is not the truth. The man, Charles Swann (Anthony Dawson), who has adopted aliases, turns out to be an ex-classmate of Tony’s from Cambridge, and he appears in a class picture that hangs on the wall in Tony’s flat. The luring of Swann to buy his car is a ruse, and Tony now abandons the cane he used to fake his injury. Swann then knows there is something unexpected going on. Tony has done his homework and knows Swann has a criminal background, and has followed him, discovering his activities, and implies that Swann murdered a woman for financial gain. He tells Swann that he knew about his wife’s affair, and at first thought of killing Mark. He then says he thought better of it, and realized that it was more logical to do away with his wife, since he can inherit her substantial estate. Tony’s easygoing manner, his appearance of normality, is undercut by the abnormal content of what he is actually saying. Tony reveals that he has been planning his crime for quite a while, so his decent behavior toward Margo has also been a sham. He pretended to want to be near his wife, so he retired from tennis. He was the one who stole the letter and sent the blackmail note to confirm that his wife wanted to hide her affair. He pretends (more deception) to drop the love letter so that Swann picks it up, thus getting Swann’s fingerprints on the envelope. Along with the evidence he has concerning Swann’s illegal activities, he now can blackmail him because he can say that Swann stole the purse and was trying to extort money from the Wendice’s. Tony knows that along with the “stick” to get Swann to do his bidding, he also must offer a “carrot.” Over time, Tony has withdrawn small sums of money to build up a cash reserve. He exchanged the withdrawals for other bills along the way to make it difficult to link him to the money he now offers Swann to kill Margot.

Tony has swiped Margot’s key to their place. The plan is to place it under the rug on one of the steps of the staircase outside of the inside door to the flat. Tony points out that the outside door is always open (in its own way a deception, since it would appear to most to be locked). Swann will use the key to get inside the flat, and return the key to its hiding place. Tony will have an alibi by attending a stag party with Mark, pretending to enjoy his company, and probably giving Tony inner satisfaction that he is enrolling the unknowing Mark in the plan to murder his lover. Tony will pretend to call his boss, but actually phone the flat first, causing Margot to get out of bed. When she answers the phone on the desk in front of the French doors, Swann will come out from hiding behind the curtains and strangle Margot with a scarf. He will have a bag meant to steal objects from the flat, but he will leave it there, making it look like the phone call and Margot surprised the burglar. It will appear that the thief had an altercation with Margot, resulting in her death. The symbolic thrust here is that what is hidden can be dangerous since an ignorant victim doesn’t have the information to ward off an attack. Thus, lies, too, being false information, are dangers to others. Swann asks how will it look like he entered the place, and Tony will say that Margot took walks in the garden in the back and left the patio door open.

Mark is also deceitful, being very charming and polite, wanting to drink and go out and dine with Tony, while he is really guilty of being romantically involved with his host’s wife. Since Mark is a mystery writer, Tony asks him can there be a perfect murder (the remake of this movie, A Perfect Murder, with Michael Douglas and Gwyneth Paltrow, is suspenseful, but doesn’t have this film’s levels of meaning or fun). Mark says there can be one on paper, but not in reality, which is where the plan plays out, and things can go awry (a bit of foreshadowing here). Tony probably asks Mark the question as a little personal joke since he egotistically feels he has already planned “the perfect murder,” and is fooling (more deceit) Mark into thinking that Mark is the expert on the subject.

There are escalating kinks in Tony’s plot. Margot says she will go out to a movie while the men are at the party. Tony tells her that he doesn’t want her out and about alone and persuades her to complete the task of cutting out newspaper stories of his tennis matches and placing the clippings in an album. She gets her scissors out of her box, and the men leave. At the party, another unexpected occurrence is that Tony’s watch stops and he loses track of the time he is supposed to call the flat. Swann has entered the place, and is almost ready to leave, in the absence of the call. It is here where Hitchcock, as he does so well in movies such as Psycho and Rear Window, makes the audience complicit in the criminal’s action. Since we are invested in the plan, we actually feel ourselves rooting for that man in the phone booth to get out of there so that Tony can make his call, thus putting his wife in jeopardy. Hitchcock wants us to realize we, too, have antisocial tendencies, and shouldn’t feel morally superior to the culprits in the story.

Tony does make the call, Margot goes to answer the phone, but here is where “the best laid” plan goes astray. Swann does surprise Margot and almost strangles her, but she left the scissors on the desk, grabs them, and stabs Swann in his back. Swann’s jerky, backward movement reminds one of the vampire who dies when exposed to the daylight in F. W. Murnau’s Nosferatu. It’s not the first time Hitchcock uses the reference of a vampire to characterize a killer. He also has Joseph Cotton getting out of bed like one of the undead rising from his coffin in Shadow of a Doubt. Swann falls backward onto the scissors, which plunge into him deeper, thus assuring his death.

Tony hears the struggle on the phone, and it is one of the few times he actually looks emotionally involved, such as when he says goodbye to Margot for what he thinks is the last time. When he hears Margot’s voice saying how she had to kill an intruder, Tony must rework the plan. He now tries to make it look like Swann was the blackmailer and was let in by Margot, who then killed her blackmailer. After he returns home, Tony plants the love letter with Swann’s prints on it on Swann’s body to implicate him. He burns Swann’s scarf in the fireplace, substitutes the scarf with one of Margot’s stockings, then hides the other stocking under the desk blotter to make it appear (again appearances being deceiving) that Margot made it look like Swann attempted to strangle her with a stocking that he brought with him. When the stocking is found under the blotter, the supposed murder weapon will look as if it was planted. The marks on Margot’s neck could have been self-inflicted, which points to how all surface appearance can be false. For the new story to hold up, he searches Swann’s body for Margot’s flat key and puts the one he finds in Margot’s purse.

Chief Inspector Hubbard (John Williams) arrives, and inspects the flat. He sees that the intruder could not have entered through the kitchen because there are bars on the windows. (One class member said the shadow that the bars cast on the wall are a foreshadowing of the incarceration to come). He asks if either Tony or Margot recognizes the dead man. Tony says the mustache threw him off, but admits that Swann was a classmate, and he has the picture on the wall to prove it. He also now recalls he saw Swann at the train station the day the purse was stolen. Hubbard confirms that Swann entered through the doorway, not the French windows, since the dead man’s shoes had no dirt on them. Tony’s revised plotting works, and we have a collapsed time sequence where Margot is arrested, tried, and sentenced to death for murder (it was suggested that the dress that Matrgot wore earlier had a design that appeared to loop around the neck, like a hangman’s noose). Tony now appears to be able to inherit his cheating wife’s wealth and punish her in the process. He gets a visit from Mark, who is desperate to clear Margot. Using his mystery writer skills, he tells Tony to sacrifice himself by presenting a story to the police that shows how Tony hired Swann and framed Margot. Mark has figured out what really happened, but ironically there has been so much deceit, even on his own part, that he thinks he is telling a lie and doesn’t recognize it as the truth.

Okay, the ending gets complicated. It came to Hubbard’s attention that Tony had been spending large enough amounts of money that it aroused the inspector’s suspicions. It turns out Tony was trying to ditch the cash that was supposed to go to Swann. Hubbard visits Tony at the flat, and since their raincoats are the same, switches them. We see that Hubbard seems to know the truth and he has the police bring Margot to the flat while he and Mark wait quietly inside. Margot can’t get in with her key. Hubbard knew that a flat key was not found on Swann’s body. Hubbard wanted to use the key in Margot’s purse to get into the flat earlier to check on Tony’s bank records. The key didn’t work. Hubbard searched and found the hidden key under the carpet. Tony made the mistake of assuming that Swann would replace the key under the carpet upon leaving, but instead he returned it right after opening the door. The key Tony put in Margot’s purse was Swann’s flat key. The fact that Margot didn’t know this fact shows she did not know anything about the key. Tony left the flat to do some business, but, as part of Hubbard’s plan, was told to collect Margot’s possessions at the police station. When he returns and sees that the key in his possession does not work, he realizes that Hubbard took the wrong coat, and Tony was left with Hubbard’s flat key. Tony goes to the police station to get what he thinks is Margot’s key out of the purse to open the door. When it doesn’t work, he walks away. But, Hubbard can see through the window that Tony is reasoning it out and he comes back in, gets the key under the carpet, and opens the door. Thus, he reveals that he was the plotter all along. Tony’s high opinion of his own intelligence actually works against him, as his resolving the puzzle about the key brings about his own downfall.

More evidence of the influence of German cinema on Hitchcock can be seen in his use of expressionism in the movie. The flat appears initially neat and clean and eventually becomes cluttered and drab. Margot’s hair looks less stylized, and at the end she wears no makeup, and almost appears catatonic, unable to put up a false front of pleasantness. The change in the proper exterior appearance mirrors the interior decay as society becomes undermined by corruption. But, in the last scene, after he has been found out, Tony is his smiling self again, and he, Mark and Margot are ready to share in a drink, as if to restore the semblance of proper behavior. But, there is a rather stern look on Hubbard’s face, as he brushes his mustache (which one class member said was a reference to Agatha Christie’s sleuth Hercule Poirot), implying that the show of civility, in his line of work, can just be an illusion, and thus the presence of the police is required in a potentially dangerous world.

The next film is Kiss of the Spider Woman.