Dial M for Murder (1954)

Seen at: Chez Sanyo, last week

A couple weeks ago, sitting around in a bar with some high school classmates, the subject of movies came up, and we began to compare opinions about contemporary and classic films.

One of my classmates, John R., who worked with me way-back-when on the high school newspaper, said he found contemporary films more enjoyable partly because of the acting. He said that acting in old films looked less natural, probably because actors back then were more influenced by stage acting.

It's an opinion I've heard several times before about classic films. I explained why I disagreed with it.

"Modern 'naturalistic' was invented very early in movie history," I said, "By 1915 Lillian Gish had fairly well mastered the modern cinematic style, as fluidly as, say, Robert De Niro today. What you're seeing in old films is not stage acting, but the fact that fifty years ago, people were actually different. They talked differently. They stood, walked, and held their bodies differently. They had a different vocabulary of gestures and facial expressions."

Last week I thought again about this very subject while watching Dial M for Murder at home. "Chez Sanyo" is what I call my home DVD setup, since Sanyo is the brand of both my DVD player and my television.

I had reactivated Netflix two weeks ago, after the long hiatus of my road trip. Dial M for Murder was the very first movie I put in my queue, for several reasons, one being that my friend Tiffany had insisted I see it. It was one of her favorite movies, and she had repeatedly pestered me about it, making this movie buff feel somewhat embarrassed that he had not yet seen it.

Moreover, the iconic scissors scene with Grace Kelly is one of the clips featured in Turner Classic Movie's 100 Years at the Movies montage (at about the 5:40 mark). I've tried to make a point of identifying and seeing all the movies in it, including the Edison silent shorts at the beginning. There are only a few movies featured in that are left for me to see.

One of the things that struck me while watching the film was how much one could tell that this was an actual film from the 1950s, instead of a film made today and set in the 1950s. First off, the way the clothes fit on the bodies of the actors is just plain different. Somehow the costume makers of today can make clothes that look like clothes back then, but they can't tailor them the same way, for some reason.

Moreover, there is that now-foreign syntax of facial expressions, a vernacular that is no longer current but is part of the past. Actors today use the syntax of today to convey emotions and thoughts that are readily identifiable to today's audiences. But it is not the same syntax as fifty years ago.

But maybe my friend John was correct. After all, it was more common in the Classical era to adapt hit Broadway plays as motion pictures. Perhaps there was something to this argument that acting back then was closer to stage acting.

So I asked myself: were the actors in this movie acting as if on stage? I pondered this while I got absorbed into the narrative. Cripes, Ray Milland is fantastic. I'd already known that. But this movie finally convinced me beyond a doubt that Grace Kelly is a great actress as well.

By the end of the movie, I could see no dominance of stage acting, anymore than one would see in a movie today. It thus wound up confirming my previously held opinion.

But the joke was on me. After watching the film itself, I started going through the DVD extras. There was a short feature on the history and making of the film, from which I learned a few surprising things.

For example, I learned that when this movie was made (1954), 3-D movies were all the rage (as they are today), and Hitchcock actually had to shoot this in 3-D (there are a couple give-away shots, such as when Ray Milland holds up a key to the camera). The movie is rarely screened in 3-D today, but I would love love love to see it in a theater that way.

But the most surprising thing to learn about this movie was that not only was it based on a stage play, but Hitchcock essentially shot it as a stage play with hardly any modification. This blew me away. In most cases, you can tell when a classic movie is based on a stage play, but this just went right by me, mostly because of the way Hitchcock uses the camera. In fact almost all the action is confined to a single room, just as it was originally on stage.

Yet for all that, I had not thought I was witnessing "stage acting." Gosh, I love Classic cinema.

Verdict: A masterpiece, of course---even in 2-D.