Dial M for Motif: Symbols of Objectification in Hitchcock’s Classic

Emily L. Stephens’ previous work for The Toast can be found here. Most recently, Alternative Valentine’s Day Movies.

Superficially, Dial M for Murder (1954) looks unambitious, a simple stage-to-set recreation of Frederick Knott’s hit play. Even Hitchcock, perhaps disingenuously, described it as a phoned-in effort1 knocked off between the location shooting of I, Confess and the elaborate staging of Rear Window. But the tightly-staged thriller bristles with symbols of objectification and possession, reducing Margot Wendice to a property passed from hand to hand, from man to man, as readily as the key around which the plot revolves. Their treatment of Margot, and her docile detachment, echos that objectification.

Dial M for Murder is a knotty plot inside a simple story which Hitchcock sets up with equal simplicity. In the wordless opening scenes, a pretty young housewife kisses her husband over their breakfast table. Moments later, it’s evening in the same handsome apartment, and the same woman, now radiant in red lace and taffeta, passionately kisses her lover. That’s the crux of the story: a husband, a wife, and a lover, all in the same room. Everything else is embellishment.

You probably know the story. [This article discusses the plot of Dial M for Murder in detail. Expect pervasive SPOILERS.] Margot Wendice (an unflappable Grace Kelly) meets with her former lover, crime writer Mark Halliday (Robert Cummings.) Unknown to her, Margot’s husband Tony (Ray Milland) knows all about her affair.

Tony Wendice, a former tennis champion, is a fierce competitor who doesn’t take defeat easily… or kindly. Fearing Margot will leave him – taking her small fortune with her – he blackmails a disreputable old school chum into a murder plot that should leave Tony with a dead wife, a perfect alibi, a comfortable apartment, and £90,000. When Margot kills her attacker in self-defense, Tony concocts a new plan on the fly, framing his wife for premeditated murder.

Even if you don’t know the story, you know the striking image: Margot struggling under her assailant, her hand reaching out toward the audience, imploring us for help, before landing upon that fateful pair of scissors. But that iconic picture isn’t the heart of the tale. The most important images in Dial M for Murder lurk in the background of every scene, silently evoking themes of property and possession.

The action of Dial M for Murder takes place almost entirely within the Wendice’s well-appointed London flat, and Hitchcock made every inch of that set work for him. The repeated placement of objects between the audience and the action is an artifact of the film’s original 3D release, but it’s just as effective in standard projection. The intrusion of furniture and bric-a-brac in the foreground suspends us between worlds, managing both to distance and to implicate the audience, and the modestly handsome apartment, so comfortable at the film’s opening, gradually begins to feel cluttered, even claustrophobic.

“Cluttered, even claustrophobic” sums up Margot Wendice’s love life as well. Take a close look at Margot and Mark’s passionate kiss, which opens the first act. Margot pulls free, steps back, and brushes past Mark to cross the room. When the lovers sit, the flowers before and behind them – wood inlays of blossoms on the cabinet behind Mark, a bright spray of daffodils in the foreground – seem to mock their distance and diffidence.

As Margot tells Mark of the anonymous blackmailer threatening to expose her adultery, a painting of poppies hangs boldly in the background, a brazen splash of red between them as they fret and pace. Margot clings to Mark – as passionately as she clung during their kiss – and begs him not to tell Tony of their affair.

Flowers typically symbolize love or affection, but there’s very little love on display in this film, only the rank remorse that love can lead to. Margot and Mark show little tenderness. She’s by turns ardent and distant, turning her back and deflecting his bland assurances of love. He’s smarmy and blithely dismissive, never more so than when she tells him she won’t be leaving her husband for him – a dismissal all the more stinging when you realize Tony and Mark have never even met. Mark waves off her insistence that Tony is “a completely different person” than the man she cuckolded a year prior, that he’s become “wonderful” to live with. Mark is determined to break up her marriage despite her vehemence, and only capitulates tentatively to her pleas.

In tennis, “love” means nothing. Tony Wendice, the former tennis star, has no use for love and little use for flowers. He’s a self-assured gamesman who can plot cold-blooded murder with an urbane smile. He traded on his fame and charm to win a wealthy wife, and he now plans to parlay that into life as a rich widower. As Tony lays out his plan crisply and confidently for C. J. Swann (Anthony Dawson), the disgraced former classmate selected to murder his wife, the camera angle emphasizes the mantle gleaming with loving cups, souvenirs of his lifetime of victories. Even Tony’s wing chair reinforces the imagery. When Mark sat in the same chair earlier, the angle, lighting, and his pose conspired to obscure those curves, but when Tony sits there, the viewpoint highlights the bellows and curves of the arms and wings, echoing the shape of the trophies behind him.

As tensions rise, the two men occupy opposite ends of the room – Swann standing stiffly near the French windows, Wendice easy among his trophies – and the camera cuts between them, back and forth, as a spectator’s eyes cut back and forth between two players in a tennis match.

Amidst all this tennis imagery, Hitchcock briefly revisits the floral motif, reinforcing their incongruously unromantic significance. Having laid a tidy trap of mixed persuasion and extortion, Tony Wendice delivers the coup de grace to his opponent. Swann is criminally culpable for the death of his secret lover, and only Tony Wendice knows it. Tony murmurs with sinister tact about “poor Miss Wallace,” and squarely in the screen’s center between their intent faces hangs the painting of poppies, directly above the stiff bouquet of daffodils. Swann is just as trapped by his blackmailer as Margot was by hers, and the same flowers are witness to it.

As Tony lays out the murderous details, the camera shows the action from above, mimicking the aerial view of a tennis match. Wendice strides about like a champion, dominating the court and delivering his strokes as surely as he did at Wimbledon.

Hitchcock includes a final wordless stroke to show how thoroughly Tony Wendice reduces marriage – and murder – to a game. Tony delivers the lump sum of £100 to Swann, a down-payment on murder, like a tournament-ending shot. He pulls it from the desk drawer, draws back his hand to serve, and the bundle of cash arcs across the court of that handsome living room to land tidily in the trophy-shaped wing chair. Swann watches in silent defeat, Tony’s trophies assembled behind him. Tony Wendice, defending champion, has triumphed again… for the moment.

But Tony’s plan is fatally flawed, hinging upon his wife’s passivity and predictability: she mustn’t leave the flat, or she’ll miss the key he’s hidden for her murderer; she must stay home, listen to the radio, and be in bed on time for Swann to enter unseen and hide himself; she must stand in precisely the right spot to answer the phone. Most unbelievably, she must not fight back against her attacker.