Anniversary of a (Not Quite) Perfect Murder – The American Spectator

On Jun 26, 2023

In 1954, Warner Brothers released Dial M for Murder, directed by Alfred Hitchcock and adapted by Frederick Knott from his own play, which had done well on the West End and Broadway. And boy, could you tell that this flick was based on a play. Hitchcock made zero effort to (as they say) “open it up” — i.e., to make it look less like a stage production.

Virtually the whole thing took place in the modest London living room of Tony Wendice (Ray Milland), a retired tennis player who, having discovered that his beautiful wife, Margot (Grace Kelly), is romancing an American crime novelist, Mark Halladay (Bob Cummings), talks an old Cambridge acquaintance, Charles Swann (Anthony Dawson), now a small-time crook, into killing Margot, who — despite the shabbiness of their domicile — turns out to be rolling in dough.

It was a good, solid thriller. Hell, it was Hitchcock. Yes, it was stagy as hell, and Milland and Kelly were never particularly convincing as Brits, and it was hard to believe that a knockout like Margot would either marry the terribly bland Wendice or cheat on him with the equally bland Halladay. Also, spending almost all of the picture’s 105-minute running time staring at that seedy little set was pretty damn claustrophobic. Then again, the movie had a crackerjack plot with a solution that turned on a hidden key, and it built very neatly to a satisfying climax.

Murder, He Rewrote

In June 1998 — 25 years ago this month — Warner Brothers released a remake of Dial M for Murder, titled A Perfect Murder and directed by Andrew Davis (Under Siege, The Fugitive) from a script by Patrick Smith Kelly (Don’t Say a Word). The plot was almost exactly the same, but otherwise, wow. The husband, Steven Taylor (Michael Douglas), isn’t some aging tennis bum but a charismatic Wall Street mover and shaker; his heiress wife, Emily (Gwyneth Paltrow), isn’t some piece of stay-at-home arm candy but a sparkly assistant to the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations.

Moreover, in place of the Wendices’ drab flat, the Taylors live in a stunningly glamorous spread on Central Park West — all marble floors and high ceilings — that’s crammed with expensive modern art. Also, Emily’s side dude isn’t some dull scribe but instead David Shaw (Viggo Mortensen), an uber-sexy young starving artist from Central Casting.

You’d never imagine this picture was based on a play. It takes you all over New York, it’s gorgeous to look at, and it’s directed with marvelous fluidity. Indeed, it’s very self-consciously a piece of luscious visual art whose first big sequence is a black-tie reception at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. An alternate title might well have been The Art of Murder.

As for the plot, the main way in which it differs from that of the original is that Steven doesn’t hire some random thug to kill Emily; instead, he enlists David himself. Steven, who’s far too smart to be taken in by a two-timing twit like Emily, isn’t just on to her affair — he’s researched David’s past. (READ MORE: What’s in a Name?)

And he’s learned that David, while perhaps, as Steven himself puts it, is “not half bad with a brush” (incidentally, David’s work, which is identical to that of a thousand other SoHo geniuses who pour gallons of paint on giant canvases, was created by Mortensen himself), is in fact a con artist named Winston Lagrange who’s served time at Soledad State Prison and is still wanted for his latest scam in Boca Raton — and who would, without question, gladly take a cool half-million for offing Emily rather than don stripes for his Boca debacle.

Aside from her faithlessness, Steven has another reason to rub Emily out: His finances are screwed. (As one of his underlings tells him, his “yen and mark positions are going to get hammered,” which sounds pretty painful.) In short, if he wants to keep being a Master of the Universe, he needs to get his paws — prontissimo — on Emily’s massive trust fund.

And what of Emily? While Steven’s workday is hell, she seems to have a cushy job, with long lunch breaks during which she can take the subway all the way to Greenpoint to boff her beau. At the U.N., she really does think she’s doing God’s work (“And how was your day?” Steven asks her at the start of the movie. “Any progress in saving the world?”) — but then again, she’s also convinced, twit that she is, that David, whom Helen Keller would peg at 500 yards as a grifter, is in love with her.

In a word, she’s naïve as hell — a princess who went from some blue-chip suburb like Greenwich, Connecticut, to her Turtle Bay sinecure via, say, Brown or Bryn Mawr or whatever. While Steven — who, through sheer smarts, has become a major player on the international markets — grasps what makes the world go round, Emily is a naïf who thinks the documents she shuffles around on her desk every day actually shape the planet’s fate.

Film Mocks, Critics Uneasy

Why, by the way, did Emily seek love behind Steven’s back in the first place? As she tells her best U.N. pal, he’s just so … controlling: “Every single thing always has to be on his terms…. He has no real interest in who I am.” The film’s one example of this domestic despotism comes in its very first scene: Steven and Emily are dressing for the Met event, and he asks her to — hold on to your hats — change outfits. Quel tyran! (Many a wife, of course, would be thrilled to have a husband who showed such interest in her attire.)

A running theme here is Emily’s multilingualism. After the “perfect murder” fails to go as planned, the NYPD detective who turns up to investigate it (David Suchay) proves to be a Muslim, and when Emily tosses off a few words of Arabic, it forges a bond between them. (Never mind that any devout Muslim would consider an adulteress like her deserving of murder.)

Later, when a clue sends Emily on an amateur spy mission into Spanish Harlem, the local lads seem on the verge of gang rape when she addresses them in Spanish, whereupon they pass around orders to leave her alone. The (progressive) message seems clear: An occasional nod in the direction of multiculturalism can go a long way. On the other hand, these scenes make Emily look like a silly showoff. (One is reminded of the guy on Seinfeld whom the Soup Nazi sends packing for saying, “Por favor.”)

Anyway, notwithstanding these two rare moments in which her simpleminded worldview actually seems to stand her in good stead, the film keeps prodding us to notice that while Emily, its nominal protagonist, is a vapid flibbertigibbet, Steven is as smooth as they come. It’s not that you want to see her head in a box, but you can’t help but be impressed by the cool savvy with which he plans to dispatch her.

Also, he’s witty. (Visiting David in Greenpoint, he growls, “I feel like I’m knee-deep in bohemian cachet.”) And on top of everything else, A Perfect Murder has more twists than does Dial M for Murder.

So why did it get only middling reviews (from which Roger Ebert’s enthusiastic notice was a notable exception)? I suspect that a lot of insecure critics felt obliged to compare it unfavorably with Hitchcock’s original, simply because he was Hitchcock. And perhaps some of them noticed that the film could be read as (at least) a gentle mockery of the U.N. — verboten in classy cinephile circles — or were unsettled by the fact that the closer you look at Emily, the less simpática she is. Which, to me, is a big part of what makes the film so interesting.

Indeed, much as I love Hitchcock, I have to admit that I’ve derived less pleasure from Dial M for Murder than I have from A Perfect Murder. No, I’d never claim that it’s a great film, like Citizen Kane or Rashomon or The Shawshank Redemption, but, for me at least, it belongs (as they don’t) in another category that’s not to be sneezed at. Like True Lies and The Fugitive, among others, it’s top-notch entertainment that, for me anyhow, is almost endlessly rewatchable.

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