MINOR KEY HITCHCOCK: Dial M For Murder and To Catch a Thief by Craig Hammill

It always feels like the start of a backhanded compliment (or worse subtle putdown) to call any movie “minor” in a director’s body of work.

And yet, the minor movies often provide light and perspective on the major movies.

In the case of Hitchcock, many of his minor movies often feel like rough drafts or variations on a theme or sketchbooks for his masterpieces. And we often see the Master testing the waters with certain stylistic experiments he will shortly perfect.

And for this writer, often the minor works are wonderful and interesting because they’re not as over-screened, as over-talked about, as over-praised as are the masterpieces. So a movie lover can watch a minor movie with quiet, virgin ability to appreciate it in a fresh way. There is very little of the noise, clutter, cultural shorthands (often harmful and superficial) that cling and cloud and prejudge one’s reception of a major work.

It’s for this reason that I love movies like Francis Ford Coppola’s Tetro or Youth Without Youth or Kurosawa’s Dodeskaden or Sanjuro or Woody Allen’s Broadway Danny Rose. Because they aren’t the movies that make the first paragraph in any writeup of the moviemaker, they can be appreciated in almost finer detail for what they are. Not what has been written about them.

But enough preamble!

In 1953, Hitchcock made his first picture with the blinding sun star power that was Grace Kelly with Dial M For Murder. In 1955, he made his last picture with Ms. Kelly-To Catch A Thief.

In between, he made one of his greatest pictures (and my personal favorite of all his work) Rear Window-also starring Grace Kelly.

What’s interesting with many directors is how sometimes the “minor” appellation coincides with “box office hit”. Not always of course. But it did with Hitch.

Hitch had just made 1953’s I Confess starring Montgomery Clift as a priest who overhears a murderer’s confession. He struggles with his religious obligation to keep the revelations confidential and his desire to help the law catch a killer.

It did not catch fire with the audience. So Hitchcock took on Dial M For Murder partially because he knew the material would be a crowd pleaser and with Grace Kelly as the star, he felt confident he could make the studio some money. And he was right. Dial M For Murder became one of the biggest box office grossers of 1954 and bought Hitchcock the cache to make Rear Window.

If you’ve never seen Dial M For Murder, it is a delightful movie full of twists. Based on a stage play, it tells the story of how disenchanted and cuckolded husband Tony (Ray Milland) sets up his wife, wealthy socialite Margot (Grace Kelly) to be murdered. When she ends up killing the killer, Tony engineers it so Margot goes to prison for murder instead of self-defense. Margot’s lover, mystery writer Mark (Robert Cummings from Hitchcock’s own Saboteur) waits in the wings determined to prove Margot’s innocence.

Hitch made the movie in 3D, decades ahead of the times, by using the 3D to make the audience feel it was IN THE APARTMENT spatially rather than using the gimmick to throw spears and knives and balls at the audience. He did however craft the famous scissors stabbing moment to make full use of the technology. On top of the 3D gimmick (which was already on the wane when the movie debuted), Hitchcock played up the suspense and deliciously chewable dialogue by leaning into the stage-origins of the piece rather than breaking with it.

In other words, Hitch kept the majority of the movie IN the apartment rather than opening it up to multiple locations.

And of course Hitch had an ace up his sleeve: the impossibly beautiful and charming Grace Kelly. Audiences could easily spend one hundred and five minutes just looking at this pinnacle of cinematic beauty, charisma, style, and sensuality.

What’s interesting is that for all the success and benefit that Dial M For Murder afforded Hitchcock, Hitch was the first to admit he had been cruising and on a kind of auto-pilot when he made the movie. It was just the kind of movie Hitch knew how to make and for that reason, ironically, there was not the thrill of the challenge or the new mountain to be crossed.

However, in retrospect, Hitch did get another pass at his “containing the whole story to one apartment” subgenre that he started with Rope and perfected after Dial M with Rear Window. So as pithy and frothy as Dial M For Murder is in its own right, it also serves as a kind of final prep for Rear Window which would be Hitchcock’s very next picture.

There’s an interesting pattern with some filmmakers of minor work/box office hit preceding the experimental or passion project masterpiece. Put another way, the “one for them, one for me” strategy. John Ford was another master of this approach. He would often make an economical western ahead of a more experimental work.

1955’s To Catch A Thief is as charming, breezy, and bubbly as a bottle of champagne drank with a Quiche Lorraine. Cary Grant plays former jewel thief John “The Cat” Robie who must try to ensnare a copycat thief on the French Rivera to clear his own name with the police. Grace Kelly plays rich American heiress Frances Stevens who appears to be more turned on by Robie’s criminality than his possible innocence.

The movie plays part travelogue of the Hitchcocks’ beloved French Riviera, part “who wouldn’t want to see this” romance between Grant and Kelly, and part boundary pushing experiment in sexually suggestive dialogue and scenes.

The movie is one of those interesting pictures in Hitchcock’s oeuvre like Young and Innocent (1937) and Saboteur (1943) that is filled with interesting sequences with interesting ideas but somehow doesn’t quite come together with the memorable solidity of a The Thirty Nine Steps or North by Northwest.

This isn’t to damn To Catch A Thief with faint praise because I found myself thoroughly enjoying the movie on the big screen in 35mm. All the clever visual gags and jokes (like the chic restaurant run completely by ex-criminals who all clearly seem like they have no business running a restaurant) play better (as they often do) in feet of screen instead of inches of monitor.

And the boundary pushing sexual dialogue-especially a mid-movie seduction scene in a darkened hotel room while fireworks explode out the window feel like another Hitchcock sketchbook to see how much he can get away with in plain view.

And there’s nothing wrong with a quiche Lorraine and bottle of champagne every now and then.

What these two minor key Hitchcocks of the 1950’s show most of all though is a filmmaker in such control of his craft, surrounded by a team of collaborators also at the top of their craft (Rear Window’s cinematographer Robert Burks shot almost all of Hitchcock’s movies from 1951-1964) that even when Hitch is cruising or having a lark, he’s still exploring and experimenting with vital shots, ideas, themes, subject matter that he can reapply later to powerful effect.

Ultimately a minor Hitchcock like Dial M For Murder or To Catch a Thief still has shots so memorable (Grace Kelly stabbing her would be assailant with scissors in purgatorial slashes of light, Cary Grant framed for a moment by the spotlight of a searchlight up on a French villa’s roof) they stay with you long after the picture is done.

Or put in other words, to learn from the masters, you shouldn’t just limit your viewing to the masterpieces. There is gold in the minor works as well.

Craig Hammill is the founder.programmer of Secret Movie Club.