Anthony Dawson – Movie Musings

Second-tier Hitchcock thriller, with some interesting flourishes and entertaining moments

Director: Alfred Hitchcock

Cast: Ray Milland (Tony Wendice), Grace Kelly (Margot Mary Wendice), Robert Cummings (Mark Halliday), John Williams (Chief Inspector Hubbard), Anthony Dawson (Charles Alexander Swann), Leo Britt (Party goer), Patrick Allen (Detective Pearson)

Tony Wendice (Ray Milland) is in a bind. A former tennis pro turned barely-successful sports goods seller, he loves the high life. Unfortunately, he’s running through cash like water – and, worst of all, most of it isn’t even really his but the property of his socialite wife Margot (Grace Kelly). And Margot is in the middle of an affair with trashy fiction writer, American Mark Halliday (Robert Cummings). An affair Tony knows all about, having stolen Margot’s love letters to anonymously blackmail her. But his new scheme is somewhat more permanent: blackmail disreputable Charles Swann (Anthony Dawson) into murdering Margot at a time when Tony has a perfect alibi. Sadly, things don’t go to plan – when do they ever? – and with Swann skewered in the back with a pair of scissors, Tony hurriedly improvises pining a pre-meditated murder charge on Margot all while avoiding the suspicions of Chief Inspector Hubbard (John Williams).

In his later extended interviews with Francois Truffaut, Hitchcock gave less than a few minutes to talking about Broadway-adaptation Dial M, describing it as, at best, a one-for-the-money assignment or sort of warm-up for Rear Window. He was similarly dismissive about the film being shot for 3D, which he described as a ‘nine-day wonder’ which he joined on the ninth day. Hitchcock had a tendency to play up to ideas of his genius, laying sniffy dismissal on what were viewed by critics as his lesser works (although Truffaut said Dial M grew on him every time he saw it). Actually, while Dial M does have the air of an assignment to it, there are some neat little Hitchcock touches it that, while not making it a classic, does make it an entertaining way to spend a Sunday afternoon.

After all, not many other directors would have so relished Swann’s body sliding down onto a small pair of scissors. Or found so many fascinating angles for shooting a (mostly) single-set, from lofted over-head shots that give Tony’s detailing to Swann of his elaborate plan a God-like force to crashingly tight close-ups on the phone Tony will use to dial in his alibi. Hitchcock also adds more than a little sexual energy to the play. There Margot’s affair is very much in the past, as opposed to here being very much keenly anticipated by Grace Kelly’s sensual stare over a newspaper to a clock counting down her assignation with Halliday. Hitchcock also avoided the sort of tedious ‘duck now!’ shots that has made 3D a joke in cinema-going circles, framing shots with a great deal of depth, placing key objects in different depths of field in the shot.

Dial M For Murder itself though, even with these little Hitchcock touches, tends to feel exactly like what it is: a well-heeled adaptation of a Broadway entertainment that is far more about plot, procedure and Christie-lite mystery than character or themes. (Actually, a mechanical operation like Dial M might well have appealed to Hollywood’s greatest ever proponent of the masterfully constructed tension piece more than her cared to admit). It’s a page-turner, Airport-novel transposed into glitzy, breezy entertainment where we get to flirt with someone completely naughty and wicked, but can be pretty sure the ‘howdunnit’ will become clear to everyone in the play, not just us (after all, the idea that Hitchcock – or anyone – will let Grace Kelly be executed for a crime she didn’t commit is of course preposterous).

Dial M plays very much into the Hitchcock playbook, where tension arises not from what we don’t know, but from the fact we know a little bit more than most of the characters. Just like Vertigo revealing its mystery surprisingly early, or watching a bomb tick down in Sabotage while its victims remain oblivious, we know from the start that this is all a scheme designed to entrap Margot. We know all the time exactly what Tony has done and the tension lies solely in working out whether Halliday or Inspector Hubbard will work it out and how they might manage to get Tony to pay for it. (There are also some echoes of Strangers in a Train, from Tony’s tennis-playing background to his sociopathic crime swop with Swann).

Tony is played with a suave, smugness by Ray Milland, which is just about likeable enough for a bit of you to want the selfish, shallow, self-obsessed Tony to get away with it. Milland won’t allow a slightly smug grin to disappear from his face – except in a burst of twitchy nerves when a stopped watch makes him concerned that he’s going to miss a vital phone call back home to establish his alibi during the attempted murder – and never once does he appear troubled by morality. In fact, he thinks rather sharply on his feet, pivoting in seconds from surprise at Margot’s survival to smoothly improvising a very convincing story, framed to (literally) hang Margot in. It’s an effective, enjoyable, pantomime-hissable performance which Milland has a lot of fun with.

He gets most of the film to himself, since Kelly is given a role that gives her little to do – although it does showcase her ability to communicate a great deal from looks alone, from her excitement at a future liaison, to growing fear as the police net draws around her. She’s certainly a far more magnetic performer than the bland Robert Cummings who has little about him to suggest he could set Grace Kelly all aflutter. The other key roles were filled out with actors from the original production: Anthony Dawson’s weasily opportunist Swann is perfectly convincing as the sort of cove who’d agree to murder to make his life easier while John Williams’ cements the image of the unflappable pipe-smoking detective who understands far more than it looks and lulls suspects into making fatal mistakes with an avuncular reassurance.

Dial M For Murder offers plenty of entertainment, even if it’s largely just a fairly routine plot-driven mechanical puzzle, spruced up by the odd inventive shot and engaging performance. But Hitchcock was probably right, that it sits very much in the second tier of his work.

One of the first POW films, setting a template for stiff-upper-lip derring-do

Director: Jack Lee

Cast: Leo Genn (Peter Howard), David Tomlinson (Philip Rowe), Anthony Steel (John Clinton), David Greene (Bennett), Peter Burton (Nigel), Patrick Waddington (Senior British Officer), Michael Goodliffe (Robbie), Anthony Dawson (Pomfret), Bryan Forbes (Paul), Dan Cunningham (David)

One of the most popular of WW2 movies sub-genres is the POW escape movie. The Wooden Horse was one of the first of these, showcasing the sort of barmy, off-the-wall scheme that British POWs spent their tedious years dreaming up. Based on an autobiographical novel by former POW Eric Williams – here fictionalised as Peter Howard (Leo Genn) – inmates of Stalag Luft III built a pommel horse to aid their escape. The scheme? Hide a man underneath the horse to dig a tunnel, while the guards are distracted by a never-ending stream of men jumping over it for hours and hours on end.

The Wooden Horse dramatizes this with a stiff-upper-lip ‘well done Old Chap’ Britishness, shot with a low-key documentary realism (the film blew a huge portion of its budget on location shooting). It’s almost defiantly low-key, about a world away from Steve McQueen jumping over a fence on a motorbike or the sort of emotive struggles with war pressure in The Cruel Sea. Even the escape itself is a grinding, repetitive task taking place over months moving an infinitesimal distance every day as the parade ground tunnel edges closer and closer to the fence. This low-key attitude extends to the cast, led by Leo Genn, who eschew dynamics for calm, quiet unflappability. (Ironically, despite its documentary realism, Peter Butterworth – one of the original members of the escape attempt – was told on auditioning he wasn’t believable as a POW.)

The film is split neatly into two halves. The first covers the escape plan itself and lays out a structure that became familiar from countless POW films that followed: the plan is carefully detailed, senior officers humph and finally flick the thumbs up, a parade of fellow inmates chip in expertise (from forgery to ingenious distractions), a staged accident of flipping the horse over tricks the Germans into thinking nothing is going on, the tunnel caves in, a man is left stranded in the tunnel longer than is safe… It’s all in here, while our heroes bluffly and bravely work out the logistics of smuggling soil away and mastering various French identities to make their escape.

The second half follows two of our heroes – Leo Genn’s stoic Howard and Anthony Steele’s matinee idol Clinton – as they shred their nerves moving through Europe aiming for the port of Lübeck and a ship to Norway. This is the marginally less interesting part of the film, although it conversely does feature the film’s most interesting moment as a visibly sickened Clinton is forced to kill an ordinary German guard, very different from the usual boys-own adventure attitudes you expect.

However, most of the rest of the second half is just a little too dry and documentary, despite the best efforts to play up the paranoia and tension of a life on the run in occupied territory. Lee directs with a methodical, unflashy style, while ongoing clashes with producers on the budget, which eventually saw the film completed months later by the producer and a hurriedly put-together rather abrupt (and incongruous) ending in a Swedish restaurant, which seems to lean into the beginnings of an anti-Soviet Cold-War era consensus. Some of the dramatic tension drains out of a film which actually might have benefited from a little more melodrama, among the muttered, patient conversations in alleyways and the almost-agitated debates about which resistance groups to trust.

The camp-escape half works best, probably because the ingenuity of seeing the prisoners work out the logistics of converting their pommel horse into the perfect escape weapon and overcoming the minutia of camp life remains very entertaining. There is even a certain amount of wit in the bonhomie and cheek of the escape, which the film doesn’t shy away from, from the plan depending on the willingness of hungry POWs hurling themselves over a wooden horse for hours at a time to the boarding school air of bored over-familiarity that permeates the sleeping quarters. Lee also mines some tension out of a late-night inspection of the sleeping quarters, which only just misses discovering the mountains of soil that has been hidden precariously in the ceiling.

The Germans themselves are presented fairly sportingly – The Wooden Horse doesn’t give us an obvious villain and, as noted, presents its only slain German as a tragic figure. The Germans are even fairly sporting, solemnly carrying away the offending horse with a hurt dignity after the escape – presumably the poor War Horse is to be confined to solitary – while the POWs give this hero a rousing cheer. The Wooden Horse avoids the set-up of many similar films, which often presents both a token ‘Worthy Opponent’ and a token ‘Unrepentant Nazi’ among the Germans. Instead, they are exclusively presented as straight-forward professionals – again perhaps with an eye on the emerging 1950s anti-Soviet consensus that was starting to form in Europe.

The mood of sporting endeavour around the whole film – as well as the stiff-upper-lip pluck of the imprisoned Brits – helped guide the POW film towards its natural development as a Boy’s-Own adventure story with a sense escape as the ultimate sporting adventure (though even The Great Escape throws in more than enough tragedy). The Wooden Horse sometimes lacks in drama, so swept up is it in a sort of documentary realism (it’s hard not to argue with the producers that the put-upon forbearance of John Mills might have been a better choice for the lead than the rather too smooth Leo Genn), but as an early example of a much-loved genre it offers more than enough entertainment.