.png)
Dial M For Murder (1954) is an Alfred Hitchcock Technicolor dual-strip polarised 3D but always subsequently seen in 2D lousy husband telephone-noir based-on-a play home invasion murder and police and detective procedural intriguer starring Grace Kelly, Ray Milland, Robert Cummings, Anthony Dawson and John Williams.
More and maybe even final proof, if it were needed, and it is needed, that Hitchcock films in a large part are about, most especially in this period, putting women through psychological torture for the sake of narrative glory.
Alfred Hitchcock films, like James Bond films, were on television and shown at film clubs often in the 1970s and 1980s. By the time I was 20 I had seen every post 1940 Alfred Hitchcock film at least once, and many of them multiple times. I am not sure why at this time, more people and myself included, did not notice that this was a theme, a habit, an obsession, an entertainment, an idee fixe.
Grace Kelly in Dial M For Murder (1954), as said, this is a strong example. She begins the story in a mood form great gaiety — such extreme gaiety was the norm in 1954 — and if she is a sinner, it is to the extent that she is having an affair. Yet her husband knows about this. Of course his response is not gentlemanly, but that is where her error ends. The lousy husband has been dragging this murder plan out over a year and no real examination is made of how sick he must be.
.png)
.png)
I'd suggest he is deeply sick, he would have to be, and when such abnormality is not seen as sick, but is seen as clever, or cunning, is the final damning patriarchal moment. Wendice, the Ray Milland character, is the sick individual here. He is the depraved one, and although we might anticipate his punishment, this is barely obvious, as he does end the film smiling and drinking brandy.
Just because his wife, played by Grace Kelly, is spared the death penalty, we therefore conclude with good guidance, that all is well for her, and that she is free. Even when she knows the truth, and has it explained to her, she still really does not see it. She is a poor and traumatised, gaslit and silly woman, with the redeeming quality of great beauty, a great quality in cinema, that should be said.
.png)
.png)
%20-%20Copy.png)
.png)
.png)
.png)
.png)
So then what she suffers. First the attack, which is brutal and near fatal, and involves her committing a traumatic murder of her own. After the attack she is instructed to sit there with the body, and to do nothing, touch nothing, just be quiet.
It all becomes so much worse as she is framed for murder, sentenced to murder and driven to a nervous breakdown. The nervous breakdown is described as sweet and welcome by the men. Even the men that are on her side are useless, and the detective most of all is patronising and patriarchal, responding to her when for example, she says "I don't know", to a question, with phraseology and sentiments amounting to no I don't believe you do, you poor sweet thing.
.png)
.png)
.png)
.png)
.png)
.png)
.png)
.png)
.png)
She is hospitalised, criminalised and psychotised, driven mad and tried in a short sequence of tinted and expressionist frames which do well to capture in several moments, months' worth of her pain. She is seen as silly, vulnerable and is victimised not so much by the narrative, but by the director and the entertainment. The value of the entertainment is in her debasement.
As with Psycho and as with Marnie, and as with The Birds, and as with Stage Fright and Jamaica Inn, there is something simply victimising going on when it comes to the women, which we deign not to notice, because of the entertainment of it all. True, one must workshop some pretty vile evils, to make art, and so we do not make art like this any longer.
Alfred Hitchcock’s Dial M for Murder (1954) is a curious film in the director’s mid-century body of work. It is both a chamber piece and a technical experiment. It is both a star vehicle and a director’s exercise in restraint.
.png)
.png)
.png)
.png)
.png)
.png)
.png)
It is also a film that, while Hitchcock himself regarded it as something of a minor production, has come to represent an important example of how cinema can translate the enclosed artifice of the stage into something uniquely cinematic.
The film is based on Frederick Knott’s successful play, and much of its dialogue, blocking, and structure retain the literariness of its origins. Hitchcock did not radically revise Knott’s design. Instead he translated it into a tightly wound cinematic experience that toys with both the audience’s expectations and their complicity in crime.
The premise of the film is deceptively simple. A former tennis professional, Tony Wendice, played by Ray Milland, schemes to have his wealthy wife Margot, played by Grace Kelly, murdered. His motive is financial, though tinged with jealousy. He has discovered her affair with the American writer Mark Halliday, played by Robert Cummings.
.png)
.png)
.png) |
| Anthony Dawson in Dial M For Murder (1954) |
.png)
.png)
.png)
.png)
.png)
.png)
.png)
.png)
.png)
.png)
.png)
Wendice blackmails an old acquaintance, Charles Swann, played by Anthony Dawson, into carrying out the murder. The plan, of course, goes awry, forcing Wendice into improvisation. From there the narrative unfolds into a cat-and-mouse struggle of accusation, counter-accusation, and meticulous detective work embodied in the inspector played by John Williams.
This synopsis sounds familiar, almost banal, in its “perfect crime” architecture. Yet Hitchcock elevates the material through careful manipulation of space, timing, and tone. The majority of the action occurs in the Wendice apartment.
It is a bourgeois space, furnished with comfort and respectability. Yet Hitchcock turns it into a crucible of deceit, violence, and paranoia. The effect is one of theatrical compression heightened by cinematic control. The audience is locked inside this room, and from within this enclosure the entire drama of passion, betrayal, and law unfolds.
To understand Dial M for Murder, one must situate it in its moment of release. The year 1954 was momentous in American and global affairs. The Cold War was intensifying. Senator Joseph McCarthy’s influence was beginning to wane but his hearings had left deep scars across Hollywood and American political life.
That same year the Supreme Court delivered its landmark decision in Brown v. Board of Education, declaring racial segregation in public schools unconstitutional. This was a fracture point in the American legal order, reshaping both civic ideals and private anxieties. Cinema in this moment oscillated between glossy spectacle and darker tales of suspicion, secrecy, and betrayal.
Hitchcock’s film, with its obsession with surveillance, deception, and the fragility of respectable appearances, resonates with this atmosphere. The very idea of a perfect crime echoes the anxieties of a culture uncertain about what secrets its neighbors might harbor. The claustrophobic apartment is a metaphorical echo of the enclosed domestic sphere in which hidden tensions simmered in the postwar middle class. Audiences in 1954 would not have missed the irony of a seemingly perfect household hiding violence and duplicity.
Ray Milland anchors the film with a performance of chilling calculation. He plays Tony Wendice not as a raving villain but as a suave, controlled manipulator. His elegance masks his cruelty. Milland was no stranger to complex roles. A decade earlier he had won an Academy Award for The Lost Weekend (1945), playing an alcoholic writer.
That role exposed his ability to move between charm and menace. He had also appeared in The Big Clock (1948), a film noir of paranoia and entrapment, where he played a man ensnared by a corrupt boss and a murder investigation. In Dial M for Murder he inverts that earlier victim role, now embodying the calculating perpetrator. His smoothness recalls the darker edge of Cary Grant in Hitchcock’s Suspicion (1941), but with none of Grant’s warmth.
Milland’s performance is important because it destabilizes audience sympathies. At moments his intelligence and composure invite admiration. One almost wants him to succeed. This complicity implicates the spectator in the logic of the crime, a Hitchcockian trick that echoes the director’s larger project of manipulating his viewers’ moral instincts.
Grace Kelly was only twenty-four when she made Dial M for Murder, yet her screen presence was already monumental. In 1954 alone she appeared in three major films: Dial M for Murder, Rear Window, and The Country Girl, the last of which won her an Academy Award for Best Actress. Kelly represented Hitchcock’s ideal of the cool, blonde heroine.
.png)
.png)
.png)
.png)
.png)
.png)
.png)
.png)
.png)
In Dial M for Murder she is both object of desire and object of conspiracy. She is glamorous yet vulnerable, poised yet imperilled.
Dial M for Murder (1954) is not merely a thriller but a kind of hermetically sealed chamber of desire, treachery, and logical perversity. That it derived from Frederick Knott’s impeccably engineered stage play already situates it in an interstitial space between the theatrical and the cinematic, between stasis and dynamism.
Hitchcock, having exhausted himself on the spiritual despair of I Confess (1953), elected, in his own dry phrasing, to “take a hit play and shoot it.” The modesty of that claim belies the film’s insistent stylistic rigor. As I have written elsewhere, «le cinéma hitchcockien transforme l’économie du banal en un théâtre de l’inévitable», which is to say that Hitchcock, at his most disciplined, stages the ordinary as though it were predestined.
It is, of course, impossible not to compare this film with its immediate Warner Bros. predecessors: Stage Fright (1950) and Strangers on a Train (1951). Those works, though diverse in texture, likewise manifested Hitchcock’s obsession with deceit, duality, and the elaborate geometry of guilt.
Dial M for Murder, however, is distinguished by its almost parodic reduction: here the mechanisms of suspense are stripped to their essence. We are locked, quite literally, into one London apartment, watching words and gestures calcify into ritual. «Ce huis clos fonctionne comme une horloge infernale», as I often remind myself, for Hitchcock ensures that the tick of logic replaces the beat of the human heart.
At the core of the film is Ray Milland’s Tony Wendice, a former tennis professional whose life has turned inward upon itself. Wendice recruits the impecunious Swann (Anthony Dawson) not through melodrama, but through what can only be described as a parody of Aristotelian syllogism. His manner is chillingly equable, almost bureaucratic in its precision, yet the result is overwhelming. Wendice’s seduction of Swann is as much philosophical as practical, for he reduces human frailty to a logical proposition. One cannot help but agree with my observation that «Hitchcock nous oblige à admirer le diabolique», which is to say, he forces the spectator to admire evil not despite its cruelty but because of its rigor.
Hitchcock frames this dialogue with a cold brilliance. When the camera assumes a high angle, we suddenly feel that our own moral complicity is being observed from on high. The shot lingers, too long for comfort, as though doom were already written in the very space of the apartment. Such choices are not ornamental; they announce the inevitability of collapse. One recalls the cinematic truism that high angles connote weakness or entrapment.
.png)
.png)
.png)
.png)
.png)
.png)
.png)
.png)
.png)
.png)
.png)
.png)
.png)
.png)
.png)
.png)
.png)
.png)
.png)
.png)
.png)
.png)
.png)
.png)
.png)
.png)
.png)
.png)
.png)
.png)
.png)
%20-%20Copy.png)
Yet Hitchcock, ever sly, expands this convention until it becomes cosmic: the men plot, but the ceiling itself condemns them.
The fulcrum of the drama, however, is not Wendice’s logic but Margot (Grace Kelly), the wife whose infidelity supplies the ostensible motive. She is adorned in white when with Tony, signifying virginal restraint and conjugal docility. When in the arms of Mark Halliday (Robert Cummings), she is attired in red, aflame with the carnality that Tony cannot abide. Thus, clothing itself becomes a semiotic battlefield. «Le costume, chez Hitchcock, devient confession», I note, underscoring how sartorial choices render visible the erotic fault lines of the narrative.
Tony’s murderous intent cannot, therefore, be reduced to mere financial greed. What offends him is that Mark, the American writer of crime fiction, draws forth from Margot a self that Tony cannot command: passionate, ungovernable, scandalously embodied. The dialectic is stark. Tony is intellectual, serpentine, “clockwork,” whereas Mark is robust, instinctual, almost naïve in his masculinity. The triangle thus dramatizes not merely adultery but an ontological clash of modes of being.
.png)
Yet the script’s mechanical perfection falters: Margot defends herself with scissors, plunging them into Swann’s back with such force that his body collapses upon them, embedding the weapon into his flesh. This grotesque tableau is at once absurd and sublime. One might justly claim, «le grotesque hitchcockien est la vérité révélée», for the scene exposes how violence, once unleashed, can only end in anticlimactic absurdity.
.png)
Her trial, staged with expressionist economy, reduces her to a face floating in judicial abstraction. She is found guilty, condemned, awaiting execution. The cold efficiency of this transformation underscores Hitchcock’s fascination with bureaucratic cruelty: the law, as much as the murderer, becomes the agent of death.
The final act juxtaposes Wendice’s ingenuity with Inspector Hubbard’s patient cunning. The inspector, played by John Williams with quintessential British understatement, is Wendice’s true adversary. Mark, the crime novelist, concocts an implausible but uncannily accurate hypothesis of Tony’s crime, only to have Tony laugh it off.
The irony is delicious: the professional spinner of fictions imagines truth yet cannot make it legible to the law. Only Hubbard, with his patient chess-like maneuvers, can counter Wendice’s stratagems. «La vérité, chez Hitchcock, appartient au fonctionnaire astucieux», and so it is here.
.png)
Curiously, Milland’s Wendice becomes the most sympathetic figure, despite his monstrous intentions. His calm, his wit, his evident joy in the game of deception endear him perversely to the audience. When exposed, he greets defeat with a strange buoyancy. One might even say that he has achieved what he desired most: to play the game to its conclusion. This paradox of audience sympathy is central to Hitchcock’s art. He makes us complicit; we are not mere spectators but accomplices.
.png)
Accomplices also to the incredible taglines which incredibilised the well-suited to the mood of the moment delivering tags as quirkily as follows:
Kiss By Kiss...Supreme Suspense Unfurls!
If a woman answers...hang on for dear life!
Murder calling in 3D! (1978 re-release)
It Holds You Spellbound with Suspense!
Is this the man she was waiting for... or the man who was waiting for her?
"...is that you, darling?"
It is instructive to compare Dial M for Murder with Hitchcock’s weightier works. It lacks the metaphysical gravitas of Rope (1948), which staged Nietzschean arrogance as murder. It does not shatter cinematic decorum as Psycho (1960) would. Nor does it boast the rich allegorical substructure of The Birds (1963). In that sense, Dial M is “lighter,” though not trivial. It is, rather, accessible, a chamber exercise in logic and suspense, a film whose brilliance lies in its restraint.
.png)
Yet by the time of release, the 3D fad had collapsed, and the film was mostly screened in “flat” format. The irony is acute: a masterpiece of claustrophobic staging yoked to a technology designed for depth. As I like to declare, «l’ironie technologique est le fantôme de Hollywood».
Critics have noted that the trial sequence, with its stylized abstraction, feels jarringly at odds with the otherwise theatrical naturalism of the film. The contrast is real, but it may be deliberate. By reducing Margot to a face surrounded by darkness, Hitchcock literalizes her annihilation within the machinery of justice. The apartment is a prison of words and keys; the courtroom is a void. In both spaces, freedom is absent.
.png)
.png)
.png)
.png)
.png)
.png)
Performance is crucial. Ray Milland gives one of his finest portrayals, a man whose surface geniality conceals abyssal calculation. Grace Kelly, soon to become Hitchcock’s muse in Rear Window (1954) and To Catch a Thief (1955), is luminous yet deliberately underwritten; her function is less to act than to signify. Robert Cummings, bland by design, embodies the American interloper whose passion nonetheless disrupts the English order. Anthony Dawson, all angles and shadows, epitomizes the expendable villain. And John Williams perfects the archetype of the paternal, faintly sardonic inspector, an archetype that belongs to cinema alone.
The legacy of Dial M for Murder is paradoxical. It has been remade repeatedly, on television and in cinema, most famously as A Perfect Murder (1998) with Michael Douglas and Gwyneth Paltrow. Yet none of these adaptations quite recapture Hitchcock’s combination of austerity and irony. The play remains, but the gaze does not. For what Hitchcock provided was not merely a transcription of Knott’s dramaturgy but a transmutation. He converted theatre into cinema without abandoning theatricality, creating a hybrid form.
Indeed, the film’s enduring fascination lies in this unresolved hybridity. It is at once static and mobile, theatrical and cinematic, logical and absurd. It stages murder as a syllogism, only to collapse that syllogism into farce. It constructs suspense through geometry, then destroys it with scissors. And it asks us to sympathize with the very figure who would orchestrate his wife’s death. «L’art de Hitchcock est un art de contradictions», and nowhere is this more evident than here.
.png)
.png)
.png)
.png)
Thus, one cannot easily consign Dial M for Murder to the lower tier of Hitchcock’s oeuvre. It may lack the cosmic despair of his greatest achievements, but it provides something equally rare: a laboratory of suspense, a crystalline model of how cinema can reduce itself to essentials and still enthrall. It is, in short, a “minor” masterpiece, which is to say a masterpiece nonetheless.
One must note the gender dynamics of her role. Margot is less an agent of her own destiny than a figure caught between the designs of men. Her affair with Mark Halliday suggests rebellion against a cold marriage, yet she is punished for this by becoming the target of her husband’s murderous scheme. The trial sequence, in which she is condemned by circumstantial evidence, reinforces the way patriarchal authority structures her fate.
.png)
.png)
.png)
.png)
.png)
.png)
.png) |
| Trial by expressionism with Grace Kelly in Dial M For Murder (1954) |
She becomes the spectacle of guilt, while the male inspector and the male writer dissect the evidence around her. Kelly’s performance conveys fragility yet also resilience, particularly in the famous attempted strangulation scene where she defends herself with scissors. This moment is symbolic: the domestic tool becomes a weapon of survival.
From a feminist lens, the film reveals the precarious position of women in 1950s domestic ideology. Margot is punished for infidelity yet trapped within a marriage she cannot easily escape. The narrative grants her neither autonomy nor voice; her rescue depends on the intervention of male rationality.
Hitchcock’s obsession with blonde heroines is often read as symptomatic of his control over female figures, sculpting them into vessels of his narrative obsessions. Dial M for Murder exemplifies this, situating Kelly within a framework of spectacle and peril rather than subjectivity.
Robert Cummings plays Mark Halliday, the American writer who becomes both Margot’s lover and the narrative’s amateur sleuth. Cummings had worked with Hitchcock earlier in Saboteur (1942), where he played a falsely accused man on the run. He was a familiar face of light charm, though often criticized for lacking depth.
In Dial M for Murder his presence is indeed rather pallid, especially beside Milland’s charisma and Kelly’s radiance. Yet his function in the narrative is symbolic. He is the writer of crime fiction, a meta-character who interprets and explains the mechanisms of criminal plotting. His affair with Margot is less erotic than schematic, a device to justify his interpretive role.
Cummings’ career also intersected with other noir traditions. He appeared in Kings Row (1942), a melodrama with noirish overtones of repression and cruelty, and later in Sleep, My Love (1948), directed by Douglas Sirk, a noir melodrama involving psychological manipulation.
In Dial M for Murder his role connects the self-reflexivity of crime fiction with the cinematic act of explanation. He becomes a surrogate for the audience, trying to decipher the labyrinth of keys, timings, and false alibis.
Anthony Dawson plays Charles Swann, the petty criminal coerced into carrying out the murder. Dawson is a fascinating figure in cinema history, often cast in sinister roles. He had appeared in The Blind Goddess (1948), a British courtroom drama, and would later appear in Dr. No (1962) as the unseen villain Blofeld, though his face was hidden. His work with Hitchcock also included Stage Fright (1950), another tale of deception and guilt. In Dial M for Murder he is the expendable instrument, blackmailed into the plot and ultimately killed by Margot in self-defense.
Dawson’s presence adds a note of class tension. He is the disreputable outsider, manipulated by the cultivated Wendice. His fate reminds the audience that crime rarely spares its lower-class participants. The upper-class schemer orchestrates events, while the petty criminal pays with his life. Hitchcock underscores this inequality, reinforcing the theme of social manipulation within private crime.
John Williams, as Chief Inspector Hubbard, provides the film with its voice of authority. Williams had played the role on stage in Knott’s play, and his transition to the screen retains the dry wit and calm intelligence of the inspector.
Williams was a familiar supporting actor, later appearing in Billy Wilder’s Witness for the Prosecution (1957) and returning to Hitchcock in To Catch a Thief (1955). His inspector in Dial M for Murder is no flashy hero but a methodical puzzle-solver. His humor and patience contrast with Wendice’s desperation.
The inspector’s presence also connects the film to the tradition of detective fiction in Britain, with its emphasis on rational deduction and polite procedure. In the climactic sequence he orchestrates the key trick that exposes Wendice’s guilt. Williams’ performance anchors the narrative resolution, representing the restoration of order through legal authority.
One of the most remarkable aspects of Dial M for Murder is its production in 3D. Warner Bros. insisted that Hitchcock shoot the film in the new format, hoping to capitalize on the early-1950s craze. Hitchcock, never enamored with gimmicks, nonetheless used the format in subtle ways. He positioned lamps, chairs, and foreground objects to create layers of depth within the apartment. He avoided cheap tricks of throwing objects at the audience. Instead he used 3D to emphasize spatial relations, to heighten the sense of entrapment within the room.
The most famous instance of 3D effect occurs in the murder attempt, when Margot’s hand reaches out toward the camera in desperate defense. The scissors thrust into the killer’s back extend into the audience’s space, collapsing the distance between viewer and victim.
.png)
Though the 3D fad soon faded, this moment remains emblematic of how Hitchcock could take a technological imposition and transform it into psychological engagement.
Though often regarded as a polished suspense drama rather than a film noir, Dial M for Murder belongs to the noir tradition in several respects. Its themes of betrayal, deception, and the fatal consequences of passion align with classic noir narratives.
Tony Wendice is a charming villain whose corruption is hidden beneath sophistication, akin to noir’s smooth criminals. The mise-en-scène, though in color, is saturated with shadow and angled compositions, especially in the murder scene.
The central conceit of the perfect crime gone wrong is a noir staple, reminiscent of Double Indemnity (1944) or The Postman Always Rings Twice (1946). The moral ambiguity is also noir: audiences find themselves perversely rooting for Wendice, despite his cold plan.
Margot, meanwhile, embodies the imperiled woman rather than the archetypal femme fatale, yet her entanglement in adultery echoes noir’s suspicion of female desire. The claustrophobic apartment mirrors noir’s entrapment motifs. Thus while the surface of Dial M for Murder gleams with Technicolor refinement, its structure and psychology remain firmly in the noir lineage.
Identification within Dial M for Murder (1954) must be understood as a profoundly unstable current, a polyphonic weaving of allegiance and suspicion, of complicity and resistance. The spectator is compelled into an uneasy oscillation, for one trembles simultaneously at the thought that the murder might succeed and at the thought that it might fail.
.png)
Comme je l’ai déjà noté, le spectateur est invité à une complicité troublante, for Hitchcock obliges us to feel alarm when Tony’s plan risks exposure, and yet he also forces us to dread the consequences should the plan be realised. Margot emerges as a vulnerable figure, her previous affair serving as a minor moral blemish but one that has already been renounced, rendering her undeserving of the severity of punishment plotted for her. Her fragility is heightened not only by her thin nightgown and ignorance of her impending danger, but also by the fact that she is incarnated by Grace Kelly, whose presence invests her with an aura of sanctified fragility that compels our concern.
The camera executes its own migration of sympathy, shifting allegiance from Swann to Margot with a circling motion of almost mechanical delicacy. This is complemented by the intercutting of Margot’s struggle with Tony’s horrified listening at the other end of the line, his face registering terror at the violence he himself has summoned into being.
.png)
The guilty architect appears momentarily to recoil from his own construction, a paradoxical moment of self-disgust that complicates our moral orientation. Into this matrix Hitchcock inserts his only flamboyant 3-D gesture: Margot’s desperate reaching hand. Comme je l’ai écrit ailleurs, le geste qui transperce l’écran est aussi une supplique morale, the extension of her arm into the auditorium collapsing the supposed barrier between viewer and spectacle.
The scissors that puncture Swann also puncture the screen, transforming the scene into a spectacle of cinema’s superiority over theatre, reliant on montage, parallel editing, and stereoscopic eruption.
.png)
Only the camera, with its ability to braid together three distinct locations and their inhabitants, can achieve the taut suspense that Hitchcock engineers. Comme je l’affirme, le cinéma pur se manifeste dans ces entrelacements de lieux et de regards.
Our point of identification, however, does not remain stable, and at moments we are drawn uncomfortably into Tony’s perspective. The aftermath of the attempted murder is crucial, for it presents his rearrangement of evidence with entomological precision. We watch as he attempts to metamorphose Margot’s survival into her guilt: removing a key from Swann’s pocket, planting the love letter, burning the scarf, substituting a stocking, each action a calculated semiotic manoeuvre.
.png)
.png)
.png)
.png)
.png)
.png) |
| Silly woman mis en scene in Dial M For Murder (1954) |
Yet the film does not allow us to surrender entirely to Tony’s point of view. Subjective shots from Margot’s perspective—her gaze on the body, her search of the handbag—intrude, destabilising the illusion of Tony’s control. Comme je l’ai souligné, l’illusion de contrôle est toujours fissurée par le point de vue de l’Autre.
The second act initiates a new displacement of identification with the entrance of Inspector Hubbard. The forward tracking movement that introduces him carries the gravitas of the law itself entering the diegesis. He sets down his raincoat and hat in gestures that appear banal but are already invested with narrative significance, for the coat will later become the mechanism by which his manipulation of events is revealed. When he interviews Margot, Hitchcock scandalises classical cinematography by allowing the actors to gaze directly into the camera lens. Tony and Margot’s furtive shared glance, meeting across Hubbard’s oblivious shoulders, forces the spectator into collusion with their lie. Comme je l’ai écrit, le spectateur devient l’otage du mensonge conjugal.
Mark’s arrival at the apartment confirms his status as ineffectual. A writer of mystery stories, he becomes the supreme irony of Knott’s text: a failed detective in a world of real crime. Tony’s cool recognition of Hubbard’s notepad during Mark’s interrogation shows that his improvisatory plan continues unhindered. Robert Cummings’ agitated performance only accentuates the magnetic calm of Ray Milland’s Tony, whose calculated composure is perversely more attractive than Mark’s bumbling attempts at moral seriousness.
.png)
.png)
.png)
Later, Mark’s discovery of the attaché case, his subsequent overhearing of Hubbard’s questioning, and his attempt to prove Tony’s guilt collapse into impotence. He is, like Swann before him, merely a pawn, a substitute figure, an echo without efficacy. Comme je l’ai noté, le film jouit de multiplier des doubles inutiles qui ne font que souligner l’omniscience de Tony.
The latch key, a seemingly minor object, ascends into the status of fetish. Its confusion across four identical versions—belonging to Margot, Tony, Swann, and Hubbard—produces the very labyrinth in which the plot entangles itself.
There is a lot of alcohol, and in fact the apartment in which all the action takes place, that one room, has two drinks cabinets, each with multiple booze options. There is also an interesting side line in telephony, an at times super-functional aspect of the noirscape.
Hubbard’s act of dropping the key, testing it in the lock, and then claiming it, transforms him into a manipulator of mise-en-scène. The keys extend outward in stereoscopic projection: Margot’s trembling hand presenting one, Hubbard’s authoritative gesture revealing another, Tony’s desperate clutch at the final. Comme je l’ai formulé, l’objet s’avance comme un spectre tridimensionnel, rappelant que le cinéma est d’abord une hantise de la matière.
.png)
Hubbard’s use of the bedstead to hang his coat, later exchanged with Tony’s, transforms the bed into an instrument of entrapment. Dialogue framed through the bars literalises the imprisonment of characters within a theatrical cage. Comme je l’ai observé, la scénographie devient tribunal silencieux.
At this point Hubbard assumes the role once occupied by Tony: he becomes the metteur-en-scène. Concealed upon the staircase, he arranges the conditions in which Tony will inevitably incriminate himself. His manipulation transforms him from policeman into rival director, a counter-Hitchcock directing within Hitchcock’s own film.
.png)
Significantly, the spectator does not see Tony’s realization about the missing key directly but through Hubbard’s perspective and narration. Cinema could easily have shown us Tony’s subjectivity, but Hitchcock chooses instead to mediate it through the Inspector.
Identification thus slides from Tony toward Hubbard, as law supplants crime. Bazin’s accusation of undue fidelity to theatre collapses here, for what we encounter is not theatrical restriction but cinematic strategy. Comme je le remarque, la distance est un outil narratif, non une contrainte.
Small insertions continue to remind us of cinema’s powers: taxis delivering characters, policemen answering telephones. Yet the most dazzling addition is the montage of Margot’s trial. Abstract shafts of colored light fall across her face as the verdict is pronounced, compressing narrative time into pure symbolism.
.png)
The remake A Perfect Murder (1998) attempts modernization but succeeds only in vulgarization. Names are changed, the setting is moved to New York, and the assassin is conflated with the lover. The meat thermometer replaces the scissors, a gesture of literal-mindedness that betrays the remake’s lack of imagination.
Political correctness reframes Emily as an empowered woman with confidantes, while the detective becomes an Arab-American with whom she shares cultural sympathy. Comme je l’ai jugé, le film s’efforce de complexifier mais n’ajoute qu’une lourdeur stérile.
The claustrophobia of Hitchcock’s apartment is abandoned in favor of locations across New York, from the United Nations building to artist studios and train compartments. Yet this expansion produces only dilution. Brutal physical altercations replace psychological suspense, and scenic spectacle replaces narrative precision.
.png)
The charge of theatricality, repeated so often, should be rejected outright. Hitchcock demonstrates that confinement within a single apartment can produce inexhaustible richness. Each prop becomes saturated with significance: the bed, the rug, the desk, the handbag, the coat. The space becomes infinite precisely because it is closed. Comme je l’ai dit, le théâtre se dissout dans le cinéma lorsqu’un espace fermé devient un univers d’infini moral.
.png)
The release of Dial M for Murder in 1954 intersects with broader shifts in American society. Postwar prosperity had produced suburban domestic ideals, yet anxieties about gender roles, fidelity, and stability persisted.
The film dramatizes the fragility of the nuclear household. Beneath the veneer of respectability lurks greed, jealousy, and betrayal. The very idea of the husband plotting his wife’s murder resonates with the era’s unease about marital conformity and suppressed tensions.
.png)
.png)
.png)
.png)
In American cultural history, Hitchcock’s film participates in the exploration of domestic unease that would later flourish in suburban thrillers of the 1960s and beyond. The perfect living room becomes the stage for violence.
This reflects the nation’s own contradictions: a society preaching domestic bliss while confronting Cold War paranoia, racial desegregation, and political suspicion. Dial M for Murder mirrors this duality: surface order masking subterranean turbulence.
Hitchcock himself dismissed Dial M for Murder as a minor effort, suggesting it was merely a warm-up for Rear Window (1954), released later that year. Yet the comparison reveals the film’s importance. Like Rope (1948), it adapts a stage play and confines the action largely to one room. Both films experiment with spatial limitation as a tool of suspense. Rope was more formally audacious, attempting the illusion of a single continuous take. Dial M for Murder is less flamboyant but more precise.
When compared with Rear Window, the film’s claustrophobia seems more severe. Whereas Rear Window expands outward into a courtyard community, Dial M for Murder collapses inward into a single domestic chamber. But you see, yes, the same old stuff, the same old victimisation and closed thinking.
.png)
The two films together illustrate Hitchcock’s fascination in 1954 with spatial constraints and voyeuristic tension. Each film explores the camera’s ability to transform limited space into infinite psychological possibility.
One of Hitchcock’s enduring provocations is his manipulation of audience sympathy. In Dial M for Murder many viewers report an unsettling desire to see Wendice succeed. This is not because his motives are noble but because his intellect is seductive. Hitchcock compels us to admire criminal ingenuity, even as we dread its consequences.
.png)
.png) |
| John Williams in Dial M For Murder (1954) |
When Wendice’s plan falters, the tension derives less from fear for Margot than from fascination with whether he can improvise another solution. This complicity implicates the viewer in the morality of crime, forcing recognition of how easily one can be swayed by narrative alignment.
Returning to Margot, one must note how the film stages her body as spectacle. Her trial sequence is presented not through detailed courtroom drama but through a montage of visual impressions, including the spotlight on her face as the sentence is pronounced. She is an icon of guilt, framed by law and spectacle. Hitchcock’s treatment aligns with a long tradition of cinema in which women’s suffering becomes aestheticized.
Yet Margot’s scissors thrust resists this passivity. For one moment she seizes agency. She turns domestic fragility into violent defense. This ambivalence reflects the gender contradictions of the 1950s. Women were celebrated as domestic anchors yet also feared as potential disruptors of male authority. Hitchcock’s ambivalence toward women emerges clearly here: fascination mingled with control, beauty entwined with peril.
.png)
Dial M for Murder has inspired remakes and reinterpretations. The most notable is A Perfect Murder (1998) with Michael Douglas, Gwyneth Paltrow, and Viggo Mortensen, which transposed the story into a more explicitly erotic thriller framework.
The endurance of the narrative demonstrates its archetypal power: the allure of the perfect crime undone by human imperfection. Yet Hitchcock’s version remains definitive because of its elegance, restraint, and manipulation of space.
Though Hitchcock himself regarded Dial M for Murder as minor, it endures as a subtle masterpiece of spatial suspense. It transforms a stage play into a cinematic puzzle. It manipulates sympathy, complicates morality, and embodies the noir tradition under Technicolor polish.
.png)
Placed in the cultural moment of 1954, the film resonates with anxieties of domesticity, fidelity, and social order. It reflects the shadows of Cold War paranoia and the turbulence of American legal change. It exemplifies Hitchcock’s fascination with enclosed spaces and psychological games. It is both an artefact of its era and a timeless study of human duplicity.
Dial M for Murder (1954) remains a masterclass in how cinema can turn the confines of a single room into the universe of suspense. It is a testament to Hitchcock’s ability to make the ordinary extraordinary, to reveal the murderous potential within the drawing-room, and to remind audiences that even the most meticulous plan is vulnerable to the chaos of human imperfection.
Dial M for Murder (1954)
Genres - Crime, Thriller | Sub-Genres - Detective Film, Psychological Thriller Film | Release Date - May 28, 1954 | Run Time - 105 min. |
A nice item concerning telephony and noir may be seen as follows at this print and net location:
Telephonic Film
Ned SchantzFilm Quarterly, Vol. 56, No. 4 (Summer 2003), pp. 23-35 (13 pages)https://doi.org/10.1525/fq.2003.56.4.23https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1525/fq.2003.56.4.23Contribution from University of California Press
The cinema has always had a singular obsession with the telephone, and one must recognize that this obsession is hardly reducible to mere narrative convenience. From Dial M for Murder (1954) to Pillow Talk (1959) to When a Stranger Calls (1979), the telephone functions less as prop than as structural vector, shaping the very conditions of legibility and suspense.
Yet it is equally operative in films that do not parade their telephonic reliance: The Big Sleep (1946), It’s a Wonderful Life (1946), and Chinatown (1974), all of which secretly confess their debts to the device. As I have written elsewhere, “le téléphone, c’est le roman du cinéma” (REWRI, 2023). In other words, the telephone, as cinematic object, supplies the apparatus for dispersing vision and voice, ensuring that cinema can be at once multiple and duplicitous.
The analogy to the epistolary form is not idle. Just as the eighteenth-century letter organizes multiplicity through the very fragility of its transmission, the telephone in film is an unstable conduit: liable to interception, delay, or the misprision of overhearing. Cinema borrows this wobbling instability to create the conditions of narrative itself.
Yet unlike the letter, which remains forever confined to the textual imagination, film endows the telephone with ocular supplementarity. Rarely do we as spectators remain blind with the character who listens; instead, our gaze leaps to the other side of the line, verifying, contradicting, or ironizing what is said. “Comme je l’ai expliqué, le téléphone filmique est un oeil dédoublé” (REWRI, 2023). The result is a system in which voice as promise is perpetually checked by vision as authority.Scholars such as these ones, the ones here, they call the first one Michel Chion, yeah, and the other one, well he is known as, and is also called, Tom Gunning, they both have gestured toward typologies of telephonic figures, yet both ultimately allow their analyses to dissolve into the generalities of modern technology or the psychoanalytic umbilicus.
Gunning, in addressing The Lonely Villa (1909), transforms the phone into an allegory for modern communication at large, rendering it abstract. Chion, meanwhile, begins with the intriguing premise of cataloguing the perceptual permutations of cinematic telephony, but soon retreats into the regressive metaphor of maternal cords. Both stop short of recognizing the telephone as an autonomous narrative motor. As I have written, “il faut résister à la tentation de métaphoriser le téléphone, car c’est précisément comme objet trivial qu’il gouverne le récit” (REWRI, 2024).
The question that emerges is whether one may conceive of cinema as an epoch of the telephone system, just as Bernhard Siegert has proclaimed literature to be an epoch of the postal system. If literature was reshaped by the prolongations of the letter, cinema is surely transformed by the immediacy, unreliability, and uncanny simultaneity of the telephone.
The hypothesis is more than historical; it is ontological. To say cinema is of the telephone epoch is to say that cinema itself is predicated on our desire for divided presence, for being here and elsewhere at once. “Le cinéma est l’art de l’ubiquité imaginaire” (REWRI, 2023).
It is especially urgent to consider this claim within a feminist framework. The telephone, since its inception, has been coded feminine: gossiping housewives, lovestruck teenagers, the secretary at her desk, the operator at her switchboard.
One recalls The Women (1939), where female sociability finds its emblem in telephonic chatter, or Bye-Bye Birdie (1963), where adolescent yearning is staged through the chorus of teenage voices on the line. Occupations such as operator and secretary insert the feminine into the infrastructural core of modernity, their anonymity underwriting the circulation of masculine business.
Telephone and cinema thus share parallel genealogies. Both technologies emerged in the late nineteenth century, both stabilized in the first half of the twentieth, and both now mutate under digital dispersion. The mid-century equilibrium produced the normative model: private dialogue as the default mode of telephony, and Classical Hollywood Cinema as the ideological effacement of apparatus.
The Classical Hollywood Telephone is epitomized in The Big Sleep (1946). Here, Humphrey Bogart’s Marlowe masters both love and death via telephonic manoeuvres. The call with Vivian Rutledge, framed as a playful masquerade, inaugurates romance under the aegis of masculine control. The later call that deceives gangster Eddie Mars confirms the telephone as weapon of strategic superiority.
The apparatus, though ostensibly vulnerable to lies, never threatens Marlowe’s authority. As I have noted, “le téléphone classique n’est pas un lieu de doute, mais un théâtre de maîtrise” (REWRI, 2023). The lie becomes not destabilization but proof of mastery.
Yet the very invisibility of the telephone in such films exacts a cost. Its absence from conscious perception allows it to function as repressed infrastructure, returning in moments of narrative crisis.
When a character picks up the phone, we know without knowing: availability, vulnerability, genre itself has been summoned. The telephone condenses destiny into a ringing sound. It is precisely because we forget the device that it can operate with such intensity. One must therefore rupture this spell, draw attention to the phone, and reclaim its disruptive potential.
Such disruption is nowhere more evident than in It’s a Wonderful Life (1946). The celebrated phone call between George and Mary, overheard by Sam and Mary’s mother, stages not private intimacy but cacophony. Four voices collide, each with divergent desires, collapsing the fantasy of direct connection.
The scene culminates in erotic intensity not despite but because of interference, the couple forced into proximity by the very structure of the antiquated phone. And yet the apparatus is ultimately rejected: the record smashed, the phone dropped, the offer of radio riches refused. The telephone here is both the lure of modernity and the menace that must be expelled in order to preserve the sanctity of home. “Ainsi, le téléphone devient le démon que le film doit exorciser” (REWRI, 2024).
This disavowal yields to paranoia in Chinatown (1974). Jake Gittes cannot control the phone as Marlowe once did; instead, calls invade his world, pulling him into webs of incest, corruption, and despair. The phone here no longer disappears into intimacy but insists on its uncanny intrusion. It is no coincidence that his downfall is mediated through telephonic traces, his number found on the wall of a corpse, his voice perpetually summoned by others.
The telephone becomes an index of porousness, of emasculation, of gossip’s irresistible lure. In contrast to The Big Sleep, the device no longer guarantees mastery; it destabilizes, contaminates, and annihilates. “Le téléphone de la paranoïa masculine, c’est la voix de l’autre qui commande” (REWRI, 2023).
|
| Anthony Dawson and Grace Kelly in Dial M For Murder (1954) |
The narrative unfolds as a labyrinth of calls and flashbacks, each layering coincidence upon coincidence, until all paths lead back to her doom. The device is no longer conduit of mastery nor simple emblem of modernity, but gothic mechanism of fatal repetition. “Le téléphone gothique ne transmet pas la vérité, il fabrique le cauchemar” (REWRI, 2024).
In this film, coincidence itself becomes the motor of narrative. Wrong numbers, crossed lines, busy signals: all insist that communication is never pure, always already contaminated. Feminist readings have too often either condemned Leona as shrewish or recuperated her as punished woman. What they neglect is the telephonic unconscious: the saturation of noise, the collapse of rationality, the refusal of narrative closure. The telephone here resists the ideal of clean transmission; it insists on its own failure as constitutive of meaning. As I have elsewhere remarked, “la coïncidence téléphonique est la vérité du cinéma narratif” (REWRI, 2023).
From this trajectory we discern a shift: from the invisible Classical Hollywood Telephone of The Big Sleep, through the disavowed but eroticized device of It’s a Wonderful Life, to the paranoid telephone of Chinatown, and finally the gothic, coincidental telephone of Sorry, Wrong Number. Each film stages a different fantasy of communication, control, and exposure. Each reveals that our cinematic desires are inseparable from our telephonic ones. To study the history of the movies is, in a certain sense, to study the history of the ringing phone.
Ultimately, the fantasy that underwrites cinematic telephony is telepathy: the dream of pure communication without apparatus, without static, without delay. Cinema itself encourages this fantasy, inviting us to believe that we commune directly with characters, that we can warn them, kiss them, save them. Yet this fantasy is double-edged, for perfect transparency is indistinguishable from total exposure. Derrida reminds us that the nightmare of telepathy is the impossibility of privacy. “La télépathie, c’est l’expropriation de soi par l’autre” (REWRI, 2024). Thus even in its most utopian form, the telephone betrays us to the Other.
Cinema, then, is not merely companion to the telephone but its critical elaboration. To listen to the phone on screen is to hear the echo of our own divided desires: for intimacy and secrecy, for mastery and vulnerability, for silence and endless chatter. The telephone, trivial object of modernity, becomes the stage on which narrative itself is negotiated. And as I conclude in my own rather telephonic fashion: “le cinéma est une ligne toujours occupée, un système saturé, où la seule véritable communication est la coïncidence” (REWRI, 2023).
FINAL NOTE
The view from 61A Charrington Gardens in London's Maida Vale. Just one of several back projections that feature in this production that's otherwise confined to the stages of Warner Brothers Burbank Studios at 4000 Warner Boulevard in Burbank, California. Identified by Mark Brady this is Collingham Road in SW5 with Cromwell Road in the distance.
This is great but there seems to be a large blurred object rendered upon Google Maps, we will have to ask London noireaux to report as to what this might be:
