Dial M For Murder
Watching this 1954 Hitchcock thriller, hadn't realized I had seen it before. Highly regarded, but stagey to me, although it's always a treat to watch a very good director create and use an enclosed space and make it continually interesting. We're half an hour in, as Ray Milland has convinced an old shabby-hearted acquaintance to knock off his wife. Because it is Grace Kelly we have already been placed on her side, but she has been given a blithe American tennis champion boyfriend to complicate things.
The book on Hitchcock, one of the kind of psychological thing you're supposed to notice as a film connosieur or theorist is how he implicates the viewer with certain vices (or his own vices), such as Rear Window, which is solved by and trucks in voyeurism. ...it'd be interesting to do the same with others, like a slothful person solving a mystery by sloth or a by greed or something of that nature.
I tend to find Hitchcock prudish. He inherits the British drawing room murder mystery thing where the wicked have their day, slaughter some poor innocent (or near innocent) but the bobbies in the end get their man; there is always some overlooked matter, the victim gets to be smarter than the assailant or there is, in the Christie tradition, a smug, rotund or unusual detective that pricks the balloon: fini.
It is a probably a post-Golden Age or, hell, a post-Bronze Age mentality, but I feel more of a viewer's pleasure when the killer is given his credibility, or the tyrant causes real damage, or the terror smashes things for good - not completely, but in a way that truly must be reckoned. This isn't a deathwish, it's a recognition of the persistence of evil. Mysteries remain unsolved. Mysteries that are solved? Well, the dead remain dead. There are those who can squirm from their justice. And so on. An obvious example would be Seven: there is no reason for the murders beyond a senselessly adopted pattern and the costs for battling the perpetrator are bafflingly (perhaps histrionically) high.
The book on Hitchcock, one of the kind of psychological thing you're supposed to notice as a film connosieur or theorist is how he implicates the viewer with certain vices (or his own vices), such as Rear Window, which is solved by and trucks in voyeurism. ...it'd be interesting to do the same with others, like a slothful person solving a mystery by sloth or a by greed or something of that nature.
I tend to find Hitchcock prudish. He inherits the British drawing room murder mystery thing where the wicked have their day, slaughter some poor innocent (or near innocent) but the bobbies in the end get their man; there is always some overlooked matter, the victim gets to be smarter than the assailant or there is, in the Christie tradition, a smug, rotund or unusual detective that pricks the balloon: fini.
It is a probably a post-Golden Age or, hell, a post-Bronze Age mentality, but I feel more of a viewer's pleasure when the killer is given his credibility, or the tyrant causes real damage, or the terror smashes things for good - not completely, but in a way that truly must be reckoned. This isn't a deathwish, it's a recognition of the persistence of evil. Mysteries remain unsolved. Mysteries that are solved? Well, the dead remain dead. There are those who can squirm from their justice. And so on. An obvious example would be Seven: there is no reason for the murders beyond a senselessly adopted pattern and the costs for battling the perpetrator are bafflingly (perhaps histrionically) high.