I guess It takes a real crazy sick kind of individual to possess the capabilities to commit a murder, to actually take the life of another person, to be able to walk up to somebody or in this case behind somebody and kill them, you have to be either a cold blooded evil mother fucker or just plain crazy. The first thing that slightly detracted me from this awesome story is the lack of emphasis towards human emotion when faced with the prospect of having to commit a murder. Tony Wendice (Ray Milland), jealous of his wife’s brief love affair with Robert Cummings, and rightly so, blackmails his old college buddy Alexander Swan (Anthony Dawson) into murdering his unfaithful wife (Grace Kelly) whilst her ex love interest is in town. This is the only difficulty I had with this movie, the guy he’s blackmailing seems like a smart and educated guy, not psychopathic or even in the right mind and out and out evil, he was just a guy trying to keep himself out of Jail as Ray Millands character had him pinned with details of his slightly dishonest, but not necessarily murderous or violent past.Admittedly when it comes time to murder Grace Kelly, he seems to freeze in the shot for a second, slightly apprehensive and considering the consequences, but he goes for it, and steps from beyond a curtain to strangle her. This movie is adapted from a stage play, and the fact that it’s pretty much all shot in one room shows this. The process of the blackmail murder was well planned. Swan was to enter the room using Grace Kelly’s key, which her husband steals from her hand bag. He hides the key under the stair carpet opposite their front door apartment block enabling swan to let himself into the room to hide behind the curtain. Tony organises to go out with his wife ex love interest, leaving her alone in her apartment, he tells Swan he will call him at 11pm and this will lure his wife from her slumber, she will answer the phone which is his cue to immerge from behind the curtain and Kill her.
Not quite, Grace Kelly puts up a half decent however “unlikely but forgivable for the 1950’s”fight, and ends up, whilst being strangled, reaching for a pair of scissors and stabbing swan in the back, killing him. Well maybe the actual killing blow is after he has been stabbed with the scissors and he falls on his back embedding the scissors deeper. It’s a very old school style killing, it isn’t graphic to watch, it’s very dramatic and a little over the top, but it’s not the violence that make this film great, it’s just a cool story and a great investigation.
Tony arrives back from his night out with his friends, consoles his wife for a bit and eventually talks her into leaving the living room. With her disappearing into the bedroom, or course, he can set up the scene for his alibi, now everything has gone horribly wrong. He now frames his wife for the murder by getting rid of the murder weapon (the scarf) and placing a pair of her stockings on the scene, (whilst hiding the one leg under something on his desk which is intentionally uncovered by Tony when the cops show up) and removing the key to the front door from swans pocket and placing it back in his wife’s hand bag.
The scene is set. Grace Kelly is arrested and sentenced to hang. This was made back in the days where capital punishment was still legal in Great Britain. The story unfolds nicely and it’s only the perseverance of the detective on the case (Patrick Allen) and one major mistake by Tony that reveals his real murderous intentions.
I think this movie had too many of those all too convenient events take place in order for the story to work. The fact you’re watching masterfully executed classic cinema from 1954 in 2011 really makes this forgivable. Back in 1954 such things were more acceptable, you couldn’t get away with such convenient events and coincidences nowadays, people including me would probably call it ‘contrived’. Some typical examples of these plot hooks: Tony’s battery on his wrist watch dies at 10:40, twenty minutes before he’s due to call to trigger the events, making swan slightly uneasy and apprehensive. As aforementioned, Swan isn’t a murderer or a killer but still has the ability to kill. Apartment/house keys in London in 1954 apparently all look the same. Grace Kelly completely lacks the mental capacity to tell her own side of the story. And probably the best one of them all, the ex lover, desperate to save his married lover from execution figures out the whole plan and reveals it to Tony (who orchestrated the whole thing) and the audience pretty much play by play.
The cops eventually get on Tony’s back. we don’t actually learn that the cops suspect him until the final 10 minutes or so of the movie. It’s pretty clever but simple how they get the incriminating evidence. One mistake made by Tony when he was trying to frame his wife comes back to bite him, hard.
Because this flick really deserves to be watched by anybody who reads this, and everybody else! I will not reveal Tony’s mistake.
As with Twelve Angry Men, The Odd Couple, Glen Garry Glen Ross, and many other classic movies adapted from stage plays, the films scenes are lengthy and dense in dialog. In a couple of cases the edits were quite noticeable showing that the scenes were very pieced together, a common practice maybe, but when you notice the cuts in long dialog intensive scenes, you suspect the most likely reason is that the players couldn’t carry it. Either that or Hitchcock was too eager to constantly switch his camera setups.
For want of a good old Hitchcock tale, you can't go far wrong with this one. It really is a great story, keep in mind all the details and you might just figure out how Tony gets caught out.
