Tag: Grace Kelly

Dial M for Murder (1954)

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.

To Catch a Thief (1955)

Cary Grant and Grace Kelly basically have a nice French holiday in To Catch a Thief

Director: Alfred Hitchcock

Cast: Cary Grant (John Robie “The Cat”), Grace Kelly (Frances Stevens), Jessie Royce Landis (Jessie Stevens), John Williams (HH Hughson), Charles Vanel (Monsieur Bertani), Brigitte Auber (Danielle Foussard), Jean Martinelli (Foussard)

One of the nice things about being a powerful film director is, if you fancy a nice holiday in the sun, get a film greenlit in a nice location and settle in for a nice vacation. That’s perhaps the real story behind To Catch a Thief, a popular Hitchcock film that is, at best, a second tier entry in his CV – but has some truly lovely location shots of the French Riviera in it.

The film meanders through a plot that never really heads anywhere particularly interesting, other than crossing off some of Hitchcock’s familiar beats. Cary Grant coasts along as suave former French Resistance fighter and infamous jewel thief “The Cat”, now retired to a lovely vineyard on the French Riviera (presumably off the back of his ill-gotten gains). His French resistance past has basically made him immune from persecution, until a copy-cat thief starts to plunder the jewels of the rich. With Robie Suspect #1, who better to catch a thief than…another thief?

To Catch a Thief is so much about its style, its expensive Hollywood production standards and luxurious location shooting, that it almost forgets to have any substance at all. I suppose that doesn’t completely matter when this is very much one of Hitchcock’s entertainments – a luscious change of pace from his previous film Rear Window, which was all about confined spaces, voyeurism and seedy thrills. Here instead the focus is on beauty, charm and frothy comedy, with the plot unspooling so gently, that the final resolution is virtually thrown in as an afterthought.

Instead the focus is more on the extended game of flirting between Grant and Grace Kelly as daughter of wealthy American jewel owner Jessie Royce Landis. Grant was, of course, twice as old as Kelly (and only eight years younger of course than Landis, who played his mother four years later in North by Northwest), but the two make for a chemistry laden couple. (Hitchcock cheekily has one seductive late night conversation intercut – and end – with a fireworks explosion. No prizes for guessing what that symbolises).

Much of this fire comes from Grace Kelly who, fresh from her Oscar win for Best Actress, is brimming with confidence. Clever, sexy and dangerous – she’s excited by Robie’s life of crime and loves the idea of joining him in a life of crime, don’t get many leading ladies of the time being as daring as that – Kelly oozes sex appeal and looks like she could eat Grant for breakfast. It takes all the experienced cool and charm of Grant – who adjusts the part so neatly into his wheelhouse, he feels like he could play the thing standing on his head – to keep up. Kelly is radiant and magnetic and walks off with the movie. So much so you wish it gave her slightly more to do.

But then the plot of the film doesn’t give anyone much to do. Robert Burks (Oscar-winning) photography is lovely, really capturing the beauty and elegance of the French Riviera. But the events around it are nothing to write home about, an underpowered caper with little of the director’s energy and fire or his subversive creepiness. The identity of the copy-cat will be a mystery perhaps only to those who have never seen a movie, while the generally predictable beats in every scene make it feel like a hodge-podge pulled together from the offcuts of better films.

It’s got a lovely feeling of a holiday adventure for all and sundry. Plenty of French actors dutifully trudge through – although to a man their characters are either incompetent, bullies or crooks – with The Wages of Fear Charles Vanel clearly dubbed as a seedy ex-Resistance fighter turned restaurateur. It’s all very well mounted, entertaining enough and leaves almost nothing for you to digest after it’s finished.

High Noon (1952)

Gary Cooper stands alone in High Noon

Director: Fred Zinnemann

Cast: Gary Cooper (Marshal Will Kane), Grace Kelly (Amy Fowler Kane), Thomas Mitchell (Mayor Jonas Henderson), Lloyd Bridges (Deputy Marshal Harvey Pell), Katy Jurado (Helen Ramirez), Otto Kruger (Judge Percy Mettrick), Lon Chaney Jny (Marshal Martin Howe), Eve McVeagh (Mildred Fuller), Harry Morgan (Sam Fuller), Morgan Farley (Minister Mahin), Ian MacDonald (Frank Miller), Lee Van Cleef (Jack Colby)

It’s 10:35 am on the day of the wedding of retiring Marshal Will Kane (Gary Cooper) to Quaker Amy Fowler (Grace Kelly). It should be the happiest day of his life – but events are interrupted by news that Frank Miller (Ian MacDonald), a killer Kane put away, has been released and will arrive on the midday train with his gang to kill Kane. Kane’s first instinct – and the town’s – is for Kane to flee the town: but Kane doesn’t want to spend his life looking over his shoulder, and besides his friends and colleagues in the town will stand with him right? He decides to make his stand – to the outrage of his pacifist wife – only to find one-by-one the citizens of the town excuse themselves from helping Kane. After all, who wants to die?

Playing out like a Western 24, Kane has got a little under 90 minutes to put together a posse to give himself a fighting chance against these hardened killers. Zinnemann’s film is full of carefully placed shots of clocks that hammer home the ominous approach of Kane’s seemingly inevitable death. In a brilliant use of contrasts, Kane walks with growing desperation in virtually every shot through the increasingly abandoned town, mixed with clever cut-backs to the Miller gang waiting patiently at the train station (with deep focus shots of the train lines stretching on forever) for Miller to arrive and kick off the killing. Using a wonderful combination of low-angles, tracking shots and one superb crane shot that pulls out and away to show Kane stranded alone in the abandoned town, Zinnemann’s film stresses Kane’s isolation, anxiety and growing desperation.

Because Kane is scared. And why shouldn’t he be? He’s past-his-best and over-the-hill, a long-serving hero on his last day in the job, outmatched by his opponent. Why on earth wouldn’t he be desperate for help? John Wayne and Howard Hawks hated the film, loathed its perceived anti-American-spirit and, most of all, couldn’t stand the idea of a Western hero being scared and desperate for help. They even made a twist on the film, Rio Bravo, where Wayne played a marshal turning down any and all help in order to do what a man needs to do alone. For them that was a Western hero, and this self-doubting, anxious pussy Kane – the man even cries at one point! – was an abomination.

Cooper seemed to be no-one’s choice for the film – Heston, Brando, Fonda, Douglas, Clift and Lancaster all turned it down – but scooped the Oscar as Kane. Then 51, his obvious age and vulnerability – at one point Lloyd Bridges almost beats the crap out of him – make him feel even more at risk from this threat. In a performance devoid of vanity – other than perhaps Kane landing the radiant (and thirty years younger) Grace Kelly as his wife – Cooper is sweaty, nervous, twitchy and a mix of All-American duty and genuine nerves, resentment and terror at what feels almost certain to be his end. Kane knows why he must do it, but to Wayne’s disgust, he still doesn’t like it.

Carl Foreman, the screenwriter, was to be pulled before the House of Un-American Activities for his communist sympathies. And the entire film is pretty clearly a commentary on the McCarthyite era, specifically the abandonment of those pulled before the house by those who seemed to be their friends. Like the blacklisted Hollywood writers and actors, Kane opens the film with admirers and friends all of whom eulogise his greatness and decency: and all of them turn their back on him as the chips go crumbling down.

Most of the film is given over to Kane desperately going from ally to ally, only to find that he is offered only platitudes, excuses and outright cowardice. His deputy demands a recommendation for Kane’s job, and chucks in his star when Kane refuses. Old friends hide in their houses and refuse to come out when Kane comes calling. Lon Chaney Jnr’s retired marshal pleads illness. The judge rides straight out of town and suggests Kane does the same. At a town meeting in the church, the voices calling to help Kane are few and far between, and Mayor Thomas Mitchell praises Kane to the skies, before concluding the town would be better off if he could ride away and not come back. The one man who volunteers backs down when he finds out no one else has volunteered, and the only person eager to fight is a 14 year old boy.

So much for loyalty and the American way. When the chips are down, words mean nothing and it’s the actions that show the man. Customers in the saloon talk about how life wasn’t that bad when the Millers ruled the town (to show how wrong this is, literally their first action when riding into town is to steal something from a milliners). Others moan that all this law enforcement from Kane has actually made business a bit worse for the town. Why do the hard thing, why make the stand, when it’s so much easier to just look down, keep quiet and let the just suffer while your life ticks on.

Cooper’s Kane is masterfully low-key, subtle, using only the slightest gestures to show deep-rooted, only barely hidden resentment and bitterness, covering fear. What he’s doing he’d give anything not to do, but he sees no choice. There is no other Western where the hero writes a will, and quietly weeps with his head on his hands on his desk. There is no other Western where the hero spends so long trying to make a manly task easier to do. There is no other Western where the self-serving cowardice and hypocrisy of the townsfolk are more blatant. No wonder Cooper – in the final insult for Wayne – drops his tin star in the dirt at the film’s end, as the townsfolk rush out to congratulate him on winning the duel. This is a film that looks at America as it really is – and many people didn’t like that one little bit.

Zinnemann’s direction is spot on, a perfect blend of tension build and technical mastery, mixed with superb dialogue from Carl Foreman. Not a word or shot is wasted, and every single character and event is carefully sketched in, established and build up with no effort at all. Cooper is superb, Grace Kelly just as good in a thankless role as the humourless Quaker wife who struggles with her life-long principles against her love for her husband. Beautifully filmed, with a wonderful score with Dimitri Tiomkin, High Noon is a classic for a reason, a masterpiece of slow-build and enlightened social commentary.