Sunday, July 20, 2008

Dial M for Murder

I was just about to hit the hay last night when I flipped through the channels and stumbled upon Dial M for Murder, which had just started. I've seen lots of Hitchcock but somehow this one had eluded me. I prefer his early stuff - the films he made in England before he came to Hollywood. I find The 39 Steps,The Lady Vanishes, or Foreign Correspondent much more fun than say, Psycho, or Spellbound. Still, he did a number of excellent Hollywood movies; Notorious, Strangers on a Train, Rear Window, and North by Northwest.

Dial M doesn't measure up to the best of Hitch but it will do. I was intrigued by (spoiler alert!) the plot the Ray Milland character devises to kill his unfaithful wife, Grace Kelly, and even more intrigued by how, after she kills the intruder who is supposed to kill her, he sets her up to make it seem like premeditated murder. And, of course, the Milland character almost get away with it. You know all along he won't, just as you know Grace Kelly won't end up in the gas chamber. What you don't know is what will trip him up in the end. It's fun - not hugely entertaining like the best of Hitchcock, but well worth staying up late for.

The question that kept nagging me the whole way through was this: why would Grace Kelly cheat on Ray Milland with so bland a fellow as Robert Cummings? Milland was suave, debonair, witty, charming. A bit of a cad perhaps, but a lot of woman like cads, just as, as a moviegoer, a lot of us like woman who like cads. Anyhow, Robert Cummings is such a zero that it is hard to believe she'd find something appealing about this guy. We lose respect for her. The movie would have worked much better if Cummings were the cuckolded husband and Milland were the lover. We could understand Grace Kelly making a mistake of marriage to a nonentity, and as a result we could much better understand an affair with the sophisticated Milland. Furthermore, the smallness, the nothingness, of Cummings would have made his getting caught in the end much more satisfying; we would feel he got what was coming to him and the two people who belonged together - the ravishingly beautiful Grace Kelly and the charmer Milland - were now free to do so. Instead, we're almost sorry Milland doesn't get away with it.

Grace Kelly is beautiful here but the script doesn't allow her to show off her full sensuality. She is dressed in a lovely nightgown during the murder scene and immediately afterwards; we're aware of her beauty. But the character she plays and the plot direction don't allow for anything more than this. We don't get the playful flirtations from her as in To Catch a Thief, nor the more overtly sexual longings of an adult woman as in Rear Window. This is another reason why the movie could have been better with the male roles switched. As it is, Grace Kelly is an adulteress but one without guilt or shame. If the male roles had been switched and she were shown enjoying her sensuality during a tryst with Milland, she'd be more of a fallen woman, and more interesting. As it always is in the movies, the bad girls are much more interesting than the good ones. Grace Kelly is too good here.

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