Events start after he learned that his wife Margot had a short relationship with the mysterious writer Mark Haliday, Tony Wendes decided that he would kill her. He wants to provide himself with a firm pretext and to extract a once-in-a-lifetime colleague with a shady past, Charles Swan, to kill for him. The plan is simple. Swan will be given a key to their apartment, while Hu and Haliday will be out at a dinner party, and Swan can let himself into the apartment and choke it.
Dial M remains more of a filmed play than a motion picture, unfortunately revealed as a conversation piece about murder which talks up much more suspense than it actually delivers.
The movie is worth seeing even now, if for no other aim than to show a man ambitiously experimenting with the devious facets that would inspire greater films.
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.
Was by far the most visually compelling of studio stereoscopic movies.
Eye for Film
August 19, 2013
The risk with clever thrillers is always that they will focus on pleasing the intellect at the expense of developing more depth. Dial M For Murder is a different kind of animal.
The screenplay tends to constrain rather than liberate Hitchcock's thematic thrust, but there is much of technical value in his geometric survey of the scene and the elaborate strategies employed to transfer audience sympathy among the main characters.
Ray Milland is great as cold fish Tony Wendice, a former tennis pro who plans to bump off his adulterous wife. Still, Grace Kelly is mis-cast (or misdirected) as the spouse in question.
