People who sneer at filmed plays should give Dial M for Murder a close look, as it's probably the best adapted stage play ever done. Hitchcock keeps the action confined mostly to a pair of rooms. A trial sequence is done in straight-on single shots of Grace Kelly with expressionistic lighting. Even the exteriors are mostly rear-projections, a depthless outdoors that keeps things claustrophobic.

Four perfect actors inhabit the key roles. This is probably Ray Milland's best movie, as the scheming Tony Wendice is perfectly adapted to Milland's urbane dryness. He's intelligent, crafty, and knows exactly how to show his inner tension whenever the other actors turn their backs to him.

Anthony Dawson is a fine sympathetic killer, and is really the victim of the piece. His villainy gains a special tension when we find ourselves rooting for him in the big murder scene. Hitchcock often takes advantage of difficult tasks to make us identify with unsavory characters, and Dawson is creepy enough to make us very nervous.

Robert Cummings is often disparaged as unromantic and uncharismatic, but I find him a perfect bland hero for the beautiful but icy Grace Kelly. Kelly is a bit like Nicole Kidman - a great looker capable of playing particular roles well, but cold around the heart. I never for a minute liked or believed The Country Girl. In Dial M for Murder she's Hitchcock's perfect trophy blonde actress, much more than a mannequin but still playing the glamorous, helpless female as a stock part.

They're all stock parts, really. Dial M for Murder doesn't try to do a postmodern post mortem on the chamber mystery the way Sleuth does, but it's possibly the most adept straight chamber mystery we've got. The villain is diabolical and the hero detective has to be diabolically clever to catch him. That leaves the romantic couple as supporting accessories. Margot Wendice and Mark Halliday are adulterous lovers, which doesn't make them villains but also doesn't help to make them sympathetic. Although jealousy isn't Tony's main motive, being cuckolded always has appeal as the inspiration for the perfect crime.

Dial M for Murder is a mechanical play. We listen to all the scheming and counter-scheming in the first person. Several sections of the play are devoted to acting out murder scenarios, before and after the fact. Only an Agatha Christie fan can keep up, even with Hitchcock's help in placing relevant objects and clues right under our noses. Neither he nor the play cheat, withhold evidence, or play narrative tricks ... no "lying flashbacks" here.

Hitchcock lays out a murder plan like a rehearsal for D-Day, complete with overhead analysis of the battlefield, one small apartment. When that murder falls apart, we have just enough information to follow Tony's quickly-improvised Plan B, yet not near enough to intuit Inspector Hubbard's inspired retaliatory scheme. Hitchcock must have been challenged to stay ahead of it himself, and I confess to not having it all figured out either. It's just too much fun to be carried away by the show.

Perhaps driven batty by David O' Selznick, Hitchcock spent six years or so playing with visual gimmicks and offbeat techniques, sometimes for their own sake. For Rope and Under Capricorn he experimented with long takes and complicated dolly shots, that mostly impressed other filmmakers. In Stage Fright and I Confess he tried to push the narrative language of film to show a secondary reality, with flashbacks from 'unreliable' flash-backer witnesses. Those didn't work so well. He also made time to see what he could do with color.

Dial M for Murder tackles both color and a real gimmick, 3-D. His is probably the best 3-D picture ever made, simply because the depth illusion is built into the design of every shot. Only a couple of objects project out into the audience but everything else in the movie is designed in depth. Shots are often low-angled to show pieces of ceiling beyond, and every composition has a foreground object (in dialogue scenes, usually table lamps) to balance the frame and provide something for us to 'look past' to see the actors. When the camera moves in Kiss Me Kate we feel like we're going for a roller coaster ride. In Hitchcock's picture we glide through a space with characters who seem to be in a living 3-D Viewmaster image. If anything, the 3-D effects are sublimated; I've seen the show projected well in depth and it makes it even harder to concentrate on the mystery.

Dimitri Tiomkin contributes a nervous, romantic score that makes good use of the brassy Warner Brothers orchestra. It's said that Warners' music tracks were unusually impressive in the middle fifties because of the way the music was arranged and recorded. It was also mixed hotter than usual. Brass parts weren't arranged to fight dialogue.

Last observation - the actual murder scene with the pair of scissors never seemed right to me. Maybe Margot Wendice is a powerful tennis player but penetrating a man's back at that angle is like stabbing a telephone pole, from the other side. How can she get any power behind the scissors? Perhaps Hitchcock realized this when he followed up the shot with a painfully graphic angle of the victim being impaled by his own weight when he falls. One look at that convinces everyone.

Hitch must have been censor-proof by this time. If one does not know the film, the poster artwork makes it look as though Grace Kelly is being raped, not choked. I can't help but think that the director approved the campaign while envying the role given Anthony Dawson. Hitchcock was far too portly to 'rehearse' the scene with Kelly, to show his actors how to do it.

The extras are basic but good. The Laurent Bouzereau docu uses critics as spokesmen because everyone associated with the film is long gone. The added short 3-D A Brief History does the format a disservice by claiming that people hated 3-D or derived terrible eyestrain from it. Part of that rap came from CinemaScope flacks, and some from the fact that the system was indeed unwieldy to work with. And, I suppose audiences did have to sit up straight and keep those glasses on. 3-D failed because it didn't translate into extra profit for exhibitors. Most 3-D movies were lousy because the producers depended on the gimmick to make up for production shortcomings, like Anne Bancroft being carried away by a guy in an ape suit. Also, there's the fact that exhibitors figured out the perfect system when they dropped individual nickelodeons for projection. Patrons in huge numbers only had to park their bodies in a seat to enjoy the show. The glasses were an added factor that required organization and attention. 50s movie houses were palaces of patron concern compared to the anonymous boxes we have today, but the exhibitors liked things simple back then too. There were always problems, like people who couldn't see the picture properly, complaining loudly for their money back.

Also, frankly, the studios figure they're constrained enough by enthusiasts who want letterboxing and 16:9 transfers, and don't want to complicate the market with 3-D. There's not enough money in it, didn't you hear?

On a scale of Excellent, Good, Fair, and Poor, Dial M for Murder rates:
Movie: Excellent
Video: Excellent
Sound: Excellent
Supplements: two featurettes, trailer
Packaging: Keep case
Reviewed: September 17, 2004