Dial "M" for Murder
Toni Wendice is planning to kill his wife, so he will receive her fortune, but to avoid the police's suspicion, and having discovered that Mark Holliday, an american crime-novel writer who was her boy-friend wrote her a love letter, he plans to fake a blackmail after steeling the letter. After having prepared the murder's background, Wendice achieves that an ex-school comrade accepts to kill the wife the day after, but surprisingly Margot saves her life by killing the murderer in legitime defense.Wendice thinks then of trying to make his wife appear to deliberately have killed the murderer with premeditation, using of the fact that Lesgate could have been blackmailing her for money, so that killing him would be Margot's only way to escape that situation. He achieves it, so that during the subsequent court and because of the evident existing proofs against her, she is condemned to death.
Although, Police Inspector Hubbard finally uncovers the truth one day before the wife is to be executed accused of Lesgate's "murder".
This is one of my favourite films, once again because of the reduced scenario builds (almost the whole action takes place at Wendice's home), but in spite of this we could say Hitchcock didn't make those "mistakes" observed in "Rope", and that it shows up one of the most sophisticated arguments ever engineered by Hitchcock, not to forget the masterfully planned idea of the key-exchange. Nothing so simple has ever been so unexpected.
The next remarkable point in this movie is the way Hitchcock achieved the creation of a sort of complicity between murderer, victim and viewer: unawarely, the viewer is turned into the murderer as he expects almost frantically Wendice's telephone call. The scene where Lesgate tries to strangle Margot is full of motion and realism; we "feel" Margot's surprise and desperation as well as Lesgate's brutal attack on her as it happens.
After Lesgate's death, the worked dialogues held by the triangle Wendice-Halliday-Hubbard until the film's end are typical from Hitchcock, and I think they are formally similar to those present in "Rear Window".
Besides, we should point out Ray Milland's great actuation; he played a role which I've always found similar to that played by John Dall in 'Rope', though less ironic and more analitic; as a last remark, this movie is the only one filmed in 3D-color, which by those years was a popular technical resource, and surprisingly the only one where Ray Milland appears.
