Dial M for Murder, Part 3: So Much for the Fourth Wall

This is the third installment of a five-post series about Dial M for Murder.
Part 1
Part 2
Part 3
Part 4
Part 5

For over half a century, filmmakers had been embellishing their technology, adding sound, color and improved film stock with one aim in mind: to make filmgoers forget that they were watching a movie. Then along came 3D. Promising an added dimension of reality (Julian Gunzberg's “Natural Vision” process rose to become the preferred technique), those 3D techniques accomplished just the opposite, actually reminding viewers that it's only a movie. Much of the problem lay with its vaunted depth illusion. An article in New Screen Techniques proclaimed in 1953 that “action now can seem, not only to recede into the distance beyond the opening, but to come forward through the opening.” As if that were a good thing. By seeming to protrude into the audience, 3D broke the fourth wall, interrupting viewers' suspension of disbelief. It didn't help that those cardboard spectacles were distractingly itchy and finicky and induced headaches. As a result, it was nearly impossible to become fully engrossed in a 3D movie.

Those were the challenges facing Hitchcock when he went into the studio to shoot Dial M for Murder in 1954. Long accustomed to turning a sow's ear into a silk purse (look at the performances he was able to extract from actors with whom he only reluctantly worked), Hitch integrated 3D's limitations into the concept of the film itself.

Dial M is a story about a perfect murder that relies on perfect timing and clockwork execution for its success. It's a story about process, where the mechanics of the plot draw attention to themselves. As we are made privy to the details of Tony Wendice's plan (as performed by Ray Milland) , the big questions are, How will he do it? And, Will the plan work? The machinery of 3D was the perfect foil for the mathematics of the plot; the intersection of those two concepts -- plot and production design -- occurring with the close-up of Tony's finger in the telephone dial, followed by a view of the telephone relays sliding into place with the lethal snick of a firing piston.

Tony himself isn't as smart as he is methodical, modestly admitting, “I've had time to think things out.” Charming though he is, we never fully warm up to him. He's cool and distant. Then again, none of the characters has much fire. That once-torrid affair between Margot and Mark Halliday (Robert Cummings) has gone cold and, as Eric Rohmer and Claude Chabrol put it, “the lover is a complete caricature, and the wife is as dumb as she is pretty.” Chief Inspector Hubbard (John Williams) is doubly reserved behind his British manners and his badge. No one in this story really connects. Not to sell them short – each character is fascinating and the acting is splendid, but that's the point: these people are as captivating as a new, exotic species of dragonfly under a magnifying glass. It's the plot and the deft storytelling that make this film a perennial favorite.

That distance is emphasized by Hitchcock's composition in stereoscopic relief. Repeatedly, lamps, tables, chairs and even a bed are placed between the characters or between the audience and the action. As Sheldon Hall Noted in Film History magazine, this composition “calls attention to the space around and between the actors, and between the actors and the camera,”subtly reinforcing their isolation. Paradoxically, while 3D brings us closer to the action, it distances us as well. Hitchcock knew that going in to the project, and, for a man who built a reputation bringing audiences into the subjective experience of his movies, he played to those opposing tendencies of 3D. Dial M keeps us at arms' length, as privileged observers, rooted in the mechanics of the plot as we are rooted to the mechanics of the film itself, mediated by those never-quite-satisfactory polarized spectacles.

Anticipating the audience's desire to experience three dimensions, the opening scenes include this crowd-pleaser of the looming ship that is neatly foregrounded by the picket fence and two dockhands. Fences and fence-like objects appear throughout the movie, pointing up a division of space, foreground to background. It also signals Hitchcock's aesthetic concept that he would use 3D, not to create false intimacy through gimmicks, but, rather, division and compartmentalization.

By carefully placing objects prominently inside the frame, Hitch created a sort of ad hoc proscenium, smaller in scale than the pillars flanking a theater stage and thus more porous, conjuring up an illusion of distance and space that conveys a sense of exclusion and detachment.

One of Hitchcock's cardinal rules was that the camera should never seem to break any physical laws. In this shot, however, the wall behind the liquor cabinet seems to have been rolled away. It is as if the camera, as invisible man, has been granted uncanny powers – as testified by subsequent scenes. The tension in this shot derives from its almost supernatural perspective that suggests proximity, yet which is nevertheless fenced off by the row of bottles.

In this “God's eye view” shot (another “impossible” view), Tony rehearses Lesgate through the steps he should take to commit the murder. The lamps and foregrounded chandelier enhance the binocular effect, again making one feel present in the room, yet detached. The angle is repeated later as the police survey the scene of the crime, attempting to retrace the Lesgate's steps.

For these extreme low-angle views, Hitch ordered that the set be elevated and a hole cut in the floor up through which the camera would peer. Hitch's aim was to magnify the "impression of [3D] relief."

Chief Inspector Hubbard holds the key out in close up, the new technology elevating the prop to an almost fetishlike level. (Earlier, when Margot had presented her key, it was away from the camera, her small, weak wrist rising pathetically up in the foreground as her hope evaporated and suspicion closed in on her.)

Isolated, bewildered, terrified and doomed, Margot, seemingly floating in space, crumbles under cross-examination, the alternating red and gloomy grey lighting mimicking the colors of her wardrobe, which had also grown gradually somber.

In 3D movies, the sensational lunge into the audience is almost always some sort of assault, as from a flying fist. This scene may be the only case in which the device is used to draw out audience sympathy as Margot's hand grasps outward, as if seeking or help. Says film professor William Paul, “Even as Kelly's hand reaches out into our space, it also reiterates the unbridgeable gulf that separates our space from that of the film image because we know we cannot reach back. As we finally cannot participate in the action on the screen, our status as passive viewers is forcefully reinscribed at a moment that effectively makes us complicit in the attempted murder.” That complicity began early on as we aligned our allegiance first with Tony and then Lesgate. Only during the murder scene are we finally urged to root for poor Margot, and even then, under duress of guilt.

"To Catch a Thief" as Philosophy

As his cameo shows, Hitchcock clearly put a lot of thought into the making of To Catch a Thief.

This is the second of a series of posts I wrote on Alfred Hitchcock, film and philosophy. To read the others, click here: Part One
Part Three
Part Four

Last Saturday I proposed that Alfred Hitchcock’s films can be viewed as philosophical treatises, written with a camera, not a pen. Using To Catch a Thief as a case in point, I suggested that this movie explored the relationship that an actor has to his or her role in film, as opposed to the stage. Here are a few more thoughts.

Filmmakers realized early on that verisimilitude of acting and of setting is essential to making movies. For instance, a film is more "convincing" when it is either shot on location or the scene is recreated in the studio with such detail as to look like a real location. The early Russian film theorists (led by Kuleshov, I think) insisted that the actors ought to naturally be the roles they play. It was advocated, for instance, that if one wants to depict a crowd of coal miners, a director should hire real miners to serve as extras. Such cinematic rules invite actors to evaluate what their relationship to a fictional character really means. (Cary Grant thought about this and famously said that even he couldn’t live up to the image he’d created.)

When a film explores that relationship, it enters the realm of film as philosophy.

TCaT pushes deeper into what it means to be a film actor. Just about every character in the movie is acting a role to some extent. And they do so with an explicit agenda of deception. Thus, a consideration of actors, screen acting, authenticity and deception all play into the film.

The movie concerns Robie, a former jewel thief nicknamed the Cat, who has been falsely accused of committing a recent spate of burglaries around the resort town of Monaco and must clear his name or be sent to prison. Although Robie has retired from his criminal past, many insists that he is still active and is lying about it. They maintain that his life as an honest citizen is only an act. This seems to provoke indignation from the girl Danielle (Brigitte Auber) and the rest of the former Resistance workers in her father’s circle because they are implicated in his supposed thievery. When one of the resistance members is killed, the police seize on the opportunity to identify him as the Cat in order to present an appearance to the public that they have solved the case. Justice is not their aim; for them the mere pretense suffices. Frances (Grace Kelly) and her mother (Jessie Royce Landis) put on their own show, using their wealth to live an aristocratic life that conceals their true, more humble origins. Although they own up to the ruse, that isn’t enough. They, along with the insurance agent H. H. Hughson (John Williams) get pulled into the act when they don costumes to attend a masquerade ball; Highson spends the evening disguised as an African slave in order to convince the police that he is Robey in disguise. Like a matrushka doll, he wears a disguise within a disguise. (Is the triple H in his initials a sly wink at the triple identity he takes on in this scene?) In each of these cases, these characters act one part or another as part of an agenda of deception.

In order to catch the real burglar, Robie must engage in some play-acting, by seeming to reprise his role as the Cat. Eventually, this leads to the film’s climax where he scrambles cat burglar-like across a rooftop, chasing the real Cat, who turns out to be Danielle. She reveals that she is part of a plot involving those former resistance workers to burglarize the community and to blame Robie – thus, their supposed indignation at him was also a mere performance!

In all of this deception, I see a direct relationship to the nature of film. By striving for verisimilitude, filmmakers attempt to deceive viewers into thinking that the images projected onto a white screen aren’t images at all, but the thing in itself. This kind of deception is just what happens onscreen in TcaT. I’m going to wrap these thoughts up tomorrow, or, perhaps, the day after.