Retro Cinema: Dial M for Murder, Ray Milland (Film Progression) video

Retro Cinema screening series Canal Place, Kenner Grand, Covington Movie Tavern, Slidell Grand. The local theaters continue their new screening series focusing on Hollywood classics, which for the next few weeks will double as a tribute to master of suspense Alfred Hitchcock. This week: Hitchcock's 1954 classic "Dial M for Murder 3D" (7:30 p.m. Tuesday and Wednesday, Oct. 7-8), starring Grace Kelly and Ray Milland. Coming up: "Vertigo" (Oct. 14-15), "Rear Window" (Oct. 21-22) and "Psycho" (Oct. 28-29). Tickets available at the websites and box offices of participating theaters. Source: www.nola.com

"Suspense is like a woman. The more left to the imagination, the more the excitement." -Alfred Hitchcock

As Tania Modleski has pointed out, Grace Kelly’s “perfection” in Rear Window, as in Dial M for Murder and To Catch a Thief (1955), is in itself enough to visit male anger upon her. Margot’s perfect beauty is on display in Dial M for Murder, whose events will render her by the last scene exquisitely drab.

She makes an appearance early in the film in a closely fitted red gown with long, peek-a-boo lace sleeves. This is the film’s only costume designed specifically for Kelly (by Moss Mabry) – as for Janet Leigh in Psycho (1960), the rest are off the rack. In this scene Margot realizes fully the visual power first wielded by another Hitchcock model, Daisy (June Tripp) in The Lodger (1926). While Daisy’s diegetic profession is modeling, Margot is without profession – but is played by an accomplished fashion model whose profession deploys an obvious theatricality that often destabilizes conventional gender roles; precisely her ability to model without modeling, achieving, like Cary Grant, perfect photogeneity through posture and line.

Ray Milland as her husband perfectly matches Kelly’s patrician quality, playing Hitchcock’s typically smooth villain, reminiscent of Brandon (John Dall) in Rope (1948) or Vandamm (James Mason) in North by Northwest, but also reeking faintly of the sleazy arrivisme of Jack Favell (George Sanders) in Rebecca.

Despite the presence of marquee stars Ray Milland and Grace Kelly, Hitchcock sometimes gave the impression that Dial M for Murder was a potboiler, and that the ponderousness of 3-D filming relegated it to minor status from the start. Yet he told Truffaut that he had wanted to “emphasize the theatrical aspects,” and his comments reveal definite pride in what he was able to accomplish, however imperfect the results had often been. “All of the action… takes place in a living room,” he said, “but that doesn’t matter. I could just as well have shot the whole film in a telephone booth. You might say that a filmmaker can use a telephone booth pretty much in the same way a novelist uses a blank piece of paper.”

Tony’s desperate impatience and need to control his agitation become ours, and it suddenly feels a matter of the greatest urgency that Tony solve the problem facing us. Hitchcock’s mammoth close-up of Tony’s finger dialing the number once the old man has cleared the way highlights the fact that this is a moment of moral choice for the viewer as well. It is the point of no return. The viewer collaborates with Tony by willing his finger forward in a kind of blank exhilaration.

In what is perhaps the most moving and edifying paragraph on the challenge of Hitchcockian morality that any critic has yet given us, William Rothman ushers us into the real mystery at the heart of all of the director’s work: Dial M for Murder, like every Hitchcock film, presents itself to us as a mystery, akin to the mystery of murder and the mystery of love. It declares itself to be no more mysterious, but also no less, than we are to ourselves.

Its mystery is the mystery of our own being as creatures who are fated to be born, to love, to kill, to create, to destroy, and to die in a world in which we are at every moment alone even as we are joined in a human community that knows no tangible sign, a world we did not create and yet for which we are responsible. Or we might say that a film is made and viewed and a life is lived; yet both pass before us like dreams. -"A Companion to Alfred Hitchcock" (2011) by Thomas Leitch and Leland Poague




Ray Milland - Film Progression video