Showing posts with label Dial M for Murder. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Dial M for Murder. Show all posts

Monday 13 July 2015

Blackmail and Brand at Saffron Hall

This is a review of Hitchcock’s Blackmail (1929) with full orchestra at Saffron Hall

More views of – or before – Cambridge Film Festival 2015 (3 to 13 September)
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)

13 July

* Contains spoilers *

This is a review of a special screening, at Saffron Hall, of Hitchcock’s Blackmail (1929), with a score by Neil Brand, performed by the BBC Symphony Orchestra under the conductorship of Timothy Brock




From the opening blasts on the brass in the overture to Blackmail (1929), composer Neil Brand (@NeilKBrand) establishes a contrast between a martial, accented tone, where Morse code is not out of place, and a softer one, complete with, in the ranks (no pun intended !) of the BBC Symphony Orchestra (@BBCSO), a celeste. As conductor Timothy Brock and he were to agree in the Q&A*, Saffron Hall’s (@SaffronHallSW’s) acoustic response is incredibly live, which made for a thrilling evening of silent cinema, adeptly accompanied by at least a hundred players.






Moving from a quickly rotating wheel to a police-van, crammed with listening / transmitting gear and personnel, so a tone of grandeur was established, and it was communicated – in scenes that led to an arrest where violent resistance was attempted – the impression that this was a film, too, of high energy and high anxiety, with ‘swirly’, kaleidoscopic string-effects that felt as if they were in tribute to Bernard Herrmann and his score for Vertigo (1958) (also, of course, Hitchcock).




Here, as for Underground (1928), an appropriate appreciation of pace is the hallmark of Brand’s writing, and, even in the quieter moment of the identity parade, he marks the presence of time in the moment by a chime, and soon after engages us with a jazzy feeling that he gives to muted trumpets (as well as nodding towards the signature-tune of Alfred Hitchcock Presents for the usual Hitch cameo).



The boldness of Hitchcock’s direction, and his love of symbolism, is all over this film, with plonking a waitress smack in the middle of Frank and Alice, after they have fought it out with another couple to get seated at the same table (momentarily, we have – till a better opportunity seems to present itself – one member of each couple facing the other in a stand-off) :


We ‘hear’ their words through the inter-titles, of which there is here a plethora, but he teasingly deprives us of their faces, and so their expressions (although, from the note that we see Alice take from her handbag, we know that she is not playing Frank straight**). Hitchcock, when Alice has given Frank the slip, also has the big shadows of ‘The Artist’ and of the man whom we come to know as Tracy all over where Alice is waiting for the former outside where he lives : there, after she has ascended through more shadow (with staircases cut away so that we can see their upwards progress), she then comes to be haunted by his laughing image of a jester.

Even before we get to his atelier, which madly – in keeping with having painted a jester – has the look of a mediaeval castle, those shadows, and Brand’s score, have told us that no good will come of a girl accepting an invitation to a Bluebeard’s dwelling of a place like this… Alice, who is willing to conform to the idea of a girl who just wants to have fun, just cannot resist exploring, and (with her host’s help, happy to be that close) creating an androgynous painted monster. Maybe, too, that little dress, so conveniently left out, is not meant ‘to be resisted’ ? – already, when she has toyed with getting into it, the commanding words Put it on have uneasy undertones in the orchestral writing, reminding us that this may not be the best fashion choice ever.

When, with what is perhaps spontaneous, but no longer a borderline playful removal of Alice’s own clothing***, the pair end up tussling, it is a struggle of shadows that we see – and, of course, we are catapulted forward twenty-five years to imagery of Grace Kelly, resisting attack from Robert Cummings, in Dial M for Murder (1954) (although the hand that emerges is with the knife – in 3D (yes, it was so made), it seems to come out of the screen).




Afterwards, strings and an eerie kind of playing [for those who had not seen, we were told in the Q&A that it was not a theremin, but the effect of bowing a vibraphone on full****], give the immediate psychological significance – although, by contrast, Hitch and Brand make Alice seem very purposive when dressing, covering her tracks, and leaving.

However, the shadows are there, and Alice now seems to descend a toy staircase (as if she is beginning to disassociate – as, later on, in Marnie (1964), which Brand acknowledged was in his mind now). Soon, then, we hear and are shown, in how she hesitates to cross the road, and in the daggers that she hallucinates in the neon of Piccadilly Circus (against which, not for the last time, she seems so small), her purpose is much less so, as she drifts all night…

At this stage in the proceedings, and by kind courtesy of Neil Brand himself, a link to his piece in BFI's (@BFI's) Sight & Sound (@SightSoundmag) :




With the police at the scene of the crime, once the alarm has been called, the military-type theme returns, in a heavy guise. Then Frank arrives, and is directed to have a look around : when he recognizes first Alice’s glove, and then that the dead man is The Artist, the moment is pure theatre, but we do not linger with him, as there is dramatic irony in Alice’s mother saying, via the inter-title when she has brought in a cup of tea, that anyone would think that Alice had not been to bed. And then, just as soon, Alice is left alone to get out from under the covers, in her clothes and even shoes, and with her thoughts. As she repairs her overnight damage in the mirror, a little touch of the sound of Vertigo, and we somehow know that life is never going to be the same :


* At the breakfast table, when asked to cut the bread, the combination of hand, shadow, and knife brings it all back

* Behind the counter, and against the towering shelves, Alice White, newsagent’s daughter, looks small again

* We have a spectral, soft-focus Alice, but we also have Frank, showing her the glove, and (ironically) saying This is the only clue that you were there

* When Tracy comes onto the premises, Hitchcock steps back with the camera, and we have space for deliberation, with these figures just standing there – in the Q&A, Brand told us that, scoring this, he was challenged, and just had to strip back and think of the sub-text

* Tracy reaching towards Frank’s pocket, somehow knowing that the glove is in there – and then he shows us that he has its pair


Vertigo seem to be with us again : when asked in the Q&A, Brand said that he only quoted the themes for Hitchcock Presents and, when the patrolling bobby knows nothing of what is happening high above, that of Dixon of Dock Green. However, he said that the chordal structure of the main theme from Vertigo, with its elevenths and thirteenths, is capable of being both major and minor, and Brand was glad to learn that a Bernard Herrmann sound had been heard through the use of this structure, with which he meant to evoke film noir, but without directly quoting the theme*****.

At the heart of the plot, the nub of the problem faced by Frank and Alice is in the awkward breakfast and its aftermath, with Frank at the back, on the step, and Tracy sniffing the cigar that he forced Frank to buy him. Elsewhere, though, Mrs Humphries is calling at Scotland Yard, with the note that Tracy had left for her lodger. With his score, which Brand was keen to stress to us that Timothy Brock had orchestrated and developed, we hear how paced it is, and how it is in and out of themes as emotions rise and fall.

So, when a search is under way, looking for Tracy through a montage of mugshot books and wanted bills, the martial quality in the music is there in louder form, but, very soon after, we have jazzy notes accompanied by strings : talking about Hollywood orchestras later, Brand said that that string players were always classically trained, but those on trumpets or saxes were jazzers, who were able to deliver with an immediate, full sound.


When the photo of Tracy is found, we are given harp glissandi, and then, on xylophone, dashes and dots of Morse. In Frank’s perception, Tracy becomes, as he calls him, a suspicious looking man with a criminal record, and, with a big sax swagger, he leans cockily on the mantelpiece – domesticity itself, and the assertion that a man, once fingerprinted, is assumed to lose credibility. In large form, a reference to that Vertigo sound again, before we end up with ‘brassy’ negotiation, and then, with ‘pregnant’ strings – Tracy trying to persuade himself as much as Frank that he has reason to be believed over and above Alice and him (my word against hers).

But his nerve does not hold, when other police arrive, and the whirl / swirl of the orchestra must reflect as much his state of mind as Alice’s confusion, having tried to tell Frank that she does not want him to do this and that she has something to say, but being silenced. Out through the window Tracy goes, and we revert to the opening image of the van-wheel in motion, as he flees, but keeps encountering police officers, to whom, rightly or wrongly, he thinks that his status must be known:


So it is that, after he has paused for a drink, we see him as the pursuers do, as a speck against the hugeness of the façade of The British Museum, between whose monumental columns he passed, and which towered above him. Inside, massive Egyptian heads also stress his insignificance, and his likely fate being in larger hands, and – when he descends a chain – there is another huge head behind him, with Brand giving us heavy brass, and throaty trombones. A momentary glance into the Reading Room, and then – terribly small again – Tracy is on the breast-like dome, and, next, has plunged through the glass, back into the famous space below.


As at the opening, when Alice is waiting for Frank (and berating him for keeping her waiting), we are at Scotland Yard. There is an open, gracious theme as she asks to speak to the inspector, and is told that she needs to fill in a form. In terms of instrumentation, we are down to her small voice, and, when she is shown in, we find that Frank is there : again, he is wishing to head her off in the light of Tracy being implicated. Just when she is about to speak, news of what happened to Tracy obliges the inspector to leave her in Frank’s charge.

As they leave the room, we can see her torment in her tortured hand on her bag, and then, now that she tells him, and when Frank finally realizes what did happen, he drops her hand (with nothing offering a way back).




At this dramatic conclusion, the applause was enthusiastic.

Brand was welcomed to the stage, where he warmly embraced Brock, and where the orchestra and both men took several curtain-calls : the film had been honoured by this playing, and this score, and this first venture by Saffrons Hall and Screen had been very well received.


But do not take one's word for it, as there is verification by Tweet here, with even a link to another review :






End-notes

* Which was hosted by Saffron Screen’s (@Saffronscreen’s) Rebecca del Tufo (@BeccadT), since this successful community cinema, also based with Saffron Hall at The County High School, was its projection partner for the evening.


Neil Brand, Timothy Brock, and Rebecca del Tufo at the Q&A (left to right)


** Seeing, further on, the portrait of Frank as a constable in Alice’s room suggests that they have been going steady for a while (he has now risen through the ranks), as does the dutifulness with which, when prompted, he gave her a peck on the cheek when she has waited for him after work. Is having him as a beau more to satisfy her parents’ needs than hers ? (My Russian friend, pragmatically, had no sympathy for Alice for putting herself in harm’s way with The Artist (and being no better than she should be), but that is just she…)

*** Contrast with the mucking around, even with a stranger, in Menschen am Sonntag (People on Sunday) (1930), which Brand (and Jeff Davenport) played for us at Cambridge Film Festival 2014…

**** One heard / seen recently when, in chamber configuration, Britten Sinfonia (@BrittenSinfonia) performed Joey Roukens’ new work Lost in a surreal trip (2015) (where these ears, at least, detected North by Northwest (1959)).

***** And, on the use of the theme itself in The Artist (2011), Brock and he said that they gathered that the theme had been used as a place-holder, which, when those composing for the film did not satisfy the director with anything else, simply came to be used at that point in the film : Brand agreed that the direct use of the theme not only is a musical strength that is not ‘earnt’ by the film, but also that it inaptly connects us straight to the pair of Kim Novak and James Stewart.




Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)
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Thursday 21 November 2013

What Hitchock says about Dial M for Murder...

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2013
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)

21 November

Some who scour these pages (I find that Brillo® is best) will already know that I favour a Faber & Faber series of collections, film by film, of interviews with directors.

In this case, it is Hitchcock on Hitchcock, into which I have delved for some revelations of what he put on record about Dial M for Murder (1954) :


First, in ‘Elegance Above Sex' (a very short piece of prose, which was originally published in Hollywood Reporter*), Hitchcock observes, regarding this film and Grace Kelly's part in it :

It is important to distinguish between the big, bosomy blonde and the ladylike blonde with the touch of elegance, whose sex must be discovered. Remember Grace Kelly in High Noon ? She was rather mousy. But in Dial M for Murder she blossomed out for me splendidly, because the touch of elegance had always been there.
(p. 96)



The only other mention of the film in this volume is in a very long-suffering** interview entitled ‘On Style’ : An interview with Cinema***, from which two extracts now follow

H : When you take a stage play, I said ? What do you call opening it up ? The taxi stops at the front door of the apartment house. The characters get out, cross the sidewalk, go into the lobby, get into an elevator, go upstairs, walk along the corridor, open the door, and they go into a room. And there they are, on the stage again. So, you might just as well dispense with all that, and be honest and say it’s a photographed stage play and all we can do is to take the audience out of the orchestra and put them on the stage with players.

I : You didn’t do this completely though. In Dial M ?

H : Yes, and I’ll tell you why. Because I’ve seen so many stage plays go wrong through opening up, loosening it, when the very essence is the fact that the writer conceived it within a small compass.

I : But you would still treat it cinematically ?

H : Within its area. If I can. As much as I can.
(p. 293)
 

What is of interest here is that the interviewer makes no mention of what is discussed in the review on this blog, i.e. how 3D makes the experience different, on the screen, from that on the stage, with looming bottles in the foreground, and, most of all, that fatal hand, reaching out to the audience, as if for mercy.


Moving on :

H : Well, let me say this as a maker of films. Maybe it’s a conceit on my part. I think content belongs to the original story of the writer, whoever wrote the book, that you are adapting. That’s his department.

I : That’s an interesting statement. You don’t feel then that the director, as such, is responsible for content, as you would select any different …

H : Well look, I make a film – Dial M for Murder – and what have I really had to do with that ? Nothing. It was a stage play, written for the stage, written by an author. All I had to do there was go in and photograph it.
(p. 297)


The interview is all about the element of 'style' mentioned in the title (as against 'content'), and Hitchcock contrasts the situation of this film with that of North by Northwest (1959), where his co-writer and he created the scenario, and he most interestingly goes to talk about the expectations that he sets up and then upsets in the famous crop-spraying scene.

Just for this interview alone, the volume is a very useful insight, through Hitchcock's own descriptions of what he was about with Psycho (1960), and how much more that it is that we think that we see, rather than the material that the cutting (pun intended !) actually used.



End-notes

* Vol. 172, no. 39 (November 20, 1962, 32nd Anniversary Issue).

** The unnamed interviewer, 'I' in the interview, claims (in response to Hitchock's enquiry as to what Cinema is) to be asking questions on behalf of the ?? intelligent cinema-goer ?? [actual wording needs to be checked]. However, he or she does not know what cross-cutting, art direction, or even 'a cut' are, and Hitchock - seemingly patiently - has to explain. (Why do I have the impression that Hitchock had a reputation for being 'difficult' - or was that at another time, or on set ?)

*** Originally published in Cinema 1, no. 5 (August – September 1963) 4–8, 34–35.




Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)
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Saturday 3 August 2013

Made in Maida Vale

This is a review of Dial M for Murder (1954)

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2012
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)

2 August

This is a review of Dial M for Murder (1954)

* Contains spoilers *

Maybe it's the 3-D of Dial M for Murder (1954), but the use of stock footage of the Queen Mary (arriving) in port, and the street in Maida Vale where Ray Milland (Tony Wendice) and Grace Kelly (Margot, his wife) live, seemed relatively clunky to me, unused as I am to much 3-D : I was certainly glad that the camera did not pan more than a few times, because I really did not find it a pleasant experience¹.

I mention these aspects because they do not typify the film as it proceeds, which is almost exclusively confined to an interior - a bit as is Rear Window (1954)². It is therefore no surprise to know that this chamber work was adapted by Frederick Knott from his play, and to see how the character that Milland brings to the role is a malignant presence that dominates the modest flat in and through his manipulation of Swann (Anthony Dawson), Margot, and Chief Inspector Hubbard (John Williams).

This makes for an obsessive, almost incestuous, film. I thought that I remembered it from boyhood t.v. - as so often, such memories are unreliable*** (itself a theme of the film), but, whatever I imagined, I recalled that knotted tension when a bungled plot is twisted to serve equal ends, waiting with anxiety for it crumble, and despairing at justice when it does not.

Thinking afterwards, I am convinced that Tony must have been a strategic opponent at tennis, maybe a chess-player, and that he knows how to force errors to his advantage. However, on reflection, I do not believe that - as it appears - he wholly originates his rescue on the hoof, but rather had thought through other significant moves.

And yet, if he were a tragic hero, Tony has the flaw of relying too much on his assumptions about the world in each eventuality - that his watch will not fail him, that the phone-booth will be unoccupied, that Swann will follow his instructions exactly... Lady Luck, as they say, plays right into his hands, though, when the utter weakness of his intention that Swann should have been thought to enter through the French window is exposed by the forensics.

Of course, the galling thing, which is where Hitchcock and Knott earn their reward, is that he deserves to fail for having failed to think things through, and our smouldering resentment turns to hatred when Margot stands condemned, effectively alone. We expect things of Mark as a crime writer, and he appears to disappoint, despite the fact that a few things that did not seem to work were evident to me⁴ (they were not envisaged by the nonetheless clever script, with the maverick streak given to Hubbard).

Partly because Tony has to steer her to her peril, at which he shows himself a master when Margot will not relinquish her latch-key (and we can but guess at the behaviour of which she complained to Mark (Robert Cummings) and which led to their affair), Kelly cannot shine, but must be relatively weak and cowed, and she sobs an incoherent account of things to her indifferent husband (already working out his moves). Plus this was only the 1950s, which is why the affair is considered in a bad light according to the public standards of the day - and why a husband can speak for a woman perfectly capable of speaking for herself and put the police off questioning her till the morning.

Interestingly, though, there is nothing shown to suggest that Tony specifies the manner in which he will have Swann do the murder that blackmailing him has commissioned, which could have failed in ways less capable of remedy : a knife, a gun with a silencer, for example. (Louis Malle's Ascenseur pour l'échafaud (1958) shows another operation of failure, and it would be interesting to know how, if at all, Hitchcock influenced him.)

The brutality of the intended and actual methods of death is surely not unintended, with the chosen method of the assassin, and (for Hitchcock) the Freudian significance of the emasculating scissors - the discomfort of 3-D glasses was worth it just for the moment when Kelly's arm seems to extend beyond the end of the desk and into the auditorium, but otherwise it awkwardly tended to bring into a sharp foreground intervening objects (a row of bottles, at one point). That said, the consequence (as was that of moving a bed into the living-room) was stressing the cramped accommodation, and, with it, the extent to which Tony wanted money to be able to live better.

Whatever the reality of the criminal process in that decade, a trial is concluded in a small compass of time, symbolized by a judge's talking head, and even an appeal. Again, we wonder at what Mark is doing, but need not do so much longer, with his sharp confrontation of Tony of what he could do to save Margot. Since this is a film, and not real life, we can be left in doubt what Mark suspects in saying all this, and, more miraculously (when eventually we realize it), we have Hubbard trying the pieces in a different configuration in the background.

Hitchcock's judgement of the suspense, in collaboration with that of his screenwriter, is masterly throughout, but especially in the closing reel : apart from the drama between Margot and her assailant, with Tony holding on the line (not having, I would gather, pressed Button B), the drama is all in objects, where they are, and in words. And yet it does not ring too ill of a play put on the screen, because the limitations of the physical space add to the palpability of what is happening.

The ending itself, where Kelly can finally be cut off the rein with a wonderful speech that describes exactly the disabling and desert place that is deep depression (whereas what Mark says to her about a breakdown, as if a positive thing, rings strangely in our ears), takes us almost to the so-said wire, with Hubbard narrating Tony's puzzlement, and a closing cunning and curiosity that is his doom.

Tony, however, is remorseless, only offering the victims, with their shredded nerves and with his bravado, a drink. Hubbard, who was only playfully offered one, plays with his moustache : Milland and he really have had the scope to shine in this work, with, certainly, Swann a bit like a rabbit caught in the head-lamps, and perhaps also, though they have their moments late, Kelly and Cummings.

As has been observed, the plotting is not perfect, but Milland is beautifully hateful, and Hubbard delightfully his nemesis, taking due offence at the manners of people who do not take his hat and coat from him, and possibly seeking, if only for that reason, to worst his foe, by fair means and foul.

For this reason, I cannot quite agree with TAKE ONE's reviewer that this is 'an enjoyable, if unexceptional, entertainment' : in fairness, since I am quoting that phrase out of context, I suppose that it must depend what one's scale is, and whether one has a scale for Hitchcock that 'sets the bar high', because Dial M is probably not, as he says, the masterpiece that it was proclaimed to the world to be.



End-notes

¹ Presumably where all this talk of nausea and 48 frames per second comes from...

² Same year, same actress, and, in Milland, an actor not unlike, in appearance, James Stewart from that other film. It was one of five that were taken off release and only resurfaced in the 1980s, but nothing suggests that Stewart could have brought the smooth venom and malice of Milland to Tony.

³ Perhaps the image of the relays operating at the telephone exchange caused me to confuse this film with one where the mode of operation of that technology is crucial to the detection of the identity of a culprit.

⁴ Spoiler alert :

(1) When Tony steals Margot's handbag to obtain the undestroyed letter, it is quite clear that whoever had taken it could have had any number of latch-keys cut - all that we have to answer this point, and therefore to establish the number of keys, is Margot's plaintive insistence that she got the key back, which is no assurance when the bag was not restored to her for a fortnight. What prudent person would not have ensured that the lock was changed (after all, she definitely knows that the bag contained something with her address on it), and how and why did Tony and she manage with only one key between them in the interim ?

(2) Tony sends Margot ransom-notes that ask for £50. It is unclear what Margot entrusts to Mark at the opening, other than the notes, but there might be evidence in the form of her unclaimed letter when she goes to the premises in Brixton (it is also uncertain how she would have proved herself the sender). Even if not so, she might be able to show that the putative blackmailer took no interest in securing his reward (in his account of events, I do not recall that Tony offered his accomplice a reason, but the film requires a high level of concentration not to miss anything).

(3) In any event, a blackmailer who does not ask for £1,000 straightaway, and only seeks £50 - how does one explain asking so little in the first place, as the ransom-notes would show ?

(4) If Margot has a motive in faking an attempt on her life to cover up, what is it in taking Swann's in the first place ? If she intends it and wishes to silence him, she leaves the troublesome letter on his person, and, if not, in what circumstances does a man end up with a pair of scissors in his back and falling on them ?


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