Dial M for Murder 3D – review

Made in 1953 during Hollywood's first, brief flirtation with 3D, Dial M for Murder is a version of Frederick Knott's popular West End and Broadway thriller that Hitchcock took on as a technical exercise to fulfil a contract at Warner Brothers. Sadly the vogue for 3D was over by the time it could be released (there was an embargo that forced Warners to wait until the end of the Broadway run), so it only came out in the UK on the flat screen. Apart from a brief 1984 showing at the ICA, this newly struck print is the first 3D release here.

It's a variation on Strangers on a Train in which two men discuss (first playfully, then seriously) the murder of the other's spouse, and a companion piece to Rope, another British play about psychopathic killers. But where Rope was shot in real time on a single set in what appears to be an unbroken take, Dial M employs 3D to increase the play's theatricality, using angles that resemble the view of the single set (the living room of a smart London ground floor flat) from the stalls and from the circle. To achieve this effect, Hitchcock had a pit dug for the low-angle shots.

We feel as if we're in a theatre; there's a break between the two acts marked "Intermission", and the performances and the sound are not naturalistic. Rather than let someone else mess with a play that has a formal perfection, Hitchcock did the adaptation himself, his only such credit while in Hollywood.

At Grace Kelly's trial at the Old Bailey, she's shown against neutral backgrounds, and the only other figure in the courtroom is the hanging judge. The one moment of violence comes when she's struggling with the would-be killer and instead of indulging in the usual 3D aggression against the audience, Hitchcock has us virtually willing Kelly to pick up the pair of scissors that appear to be a couple of inches in front of our eyes.

Two other little touches. First, in the scene where the scheming Ray Milland makes a crucial phone call from a London club, the Master constructed a giant phone with a King Kong-size finger to operate the dial. Second, Hitchcock makes his signature appearance in a photograph of a university reunion, sitting at the same table as the conspirators, thus identifying him as an old college friend of theirs. Dial M was remade in 1998 as A Perfect Murder, the only halfway decent remake of a Hitchcock film (apart of course from The Man Who Knew Took Much).