Dial M for Murder
A wonderfully crafted tale of greed leading to murder.
A former tennis star Tony Wendice (Ray Milland) has realized that his career in tennis is coming to an end and his rich wife Margo (Grace Kelly ) met someone else and might leave him, thus ending his comfortable existence. Her lover, a detective stories writer, has gone back to the US, however, and Tony got a reprieve. For a year he mulls the plans to get rid of her, until finally the writer comes back and Tony has to act fast. He already picked a man to do the murder for him, a former university alumni with the questionable moral standing, whom Tony blackmails into committing the murder on the night he’s supposed to take Margo’s lover to his club. However, things are not going according to the plan. The intended murderer enters the apartment and leaves the key outside as agreed with Tony earlier, but Margo begins to struggle when she is accosted by the murderer (which Tony probably never even thought of when putting the plan together!). In the struggle she accidentally finds the scissors she’s forgotten on the desk and strikes back at the murderer. The murderer is killed, Margo calls Tony in a shock and he advises her to wait for him before she calls the police. Arriving to the apartment he re-arranges a few things in a way that begin to look suspicious to the police detectives called on the scene, especially when coupled with the delay in calling them in the first place. The innocent Margo is being framed as a ruthless murderess, who had arranged for the deceased to show in her apartment, so she could kill him, possibly to prevent a blackmail. She is convicted of the murder of the first degree and sentenced to death. However, her lover is trying all possible venues to save her and in his research arrives at certain inconsistencies in Tony’s story. It would not be good to give out the ending of a wonderful thriller, though in Hitchcock’s movies the crime never pays. Suffice it to say that things are getting really very interesting by the end!
I have liked Ray Milland’s performance as a suave and treacherous Tony, but I thought Grace Kelly’s character Margo was too much understated and demure (which was not Grace Kelly’s fault, by the way J ). I guess I was a bit disappointed, because I’ve seen Grace Kelly portraying much more flamboyant women and I think it’s what she did best. Still, these are the minor flaws that can’t spoil the great suspense and thrill of this classical movie.