In this post, we will take a look at two adaptations of the play ‘Dial M for Murder’, written by Frederick Knott. Wait Until Dark, a Movie I recently reviewed, is also based on a play by the same playwright. I have briefly covered some of the commonalities between the movies, Dial M for Murder and Wait Until Dark in that review.

Today, lets take a look at the Hitchcock classic Dial M for Murder and contrast it with A Perfect Murder.

Dial M For Murder (1954)

Dial M for Murder, directed by the master of suspense, Hitchcock includes Ray Milland, Grace Kelly, Robert Cummings, Anthony Dawson, and John Williams in its cast. Set in the 50s. Tony Wendice (Milland) is a former professional Tennis player married to Margot(Grace Kelly) a wealthy heiress. Tony and Margot live in an upscale apartment in London . He is well aware that his wife is having an affair with an American novelist, Mark Holliday.

The entire plot is set in Margot and Tony’s luxury apartment.

Mark arrives in London from the US and meets Margot in the apartment when Tony is away. Margot reveals to Mark that she had burnt, all but one of the letters, Mark had written to her. Margot tells Mark that she had placed the letter in a handbag and that the handbag and the letter were now missing. She is visibly disturbed and tells Mark that she has been receiving a letter from a blackmailer. The blackmailer has written the letter using capital alphabets to conceal his handwriting.

Tony returns to the apartment, and Margot introduce the men to each other. Tony insists that Mark should join him at a poker party the following day.

In the next scene Tony arranges to meet Charles Schwan, an old acquaintance, privately at his home, when his wife is away with Mark . With the flair of a History Professor, describing the plot of a Greek tragedy, and with a cunning prolonged smile, Tony launches on a lengthy monologue. Without the slightest of human emotion, he first describes how he discovered his wife’s infidelity, by surreptitiously reading and preserving letter from Mark, by stealing Margot’s handbag that contained the letter.

In the same tone, he proceeds to describe how he first thought of killing Mark, but then decided to murder Margot, instead. Margo’s demise would Tony him the sole beneficiary of all her wealth, and hence a better proposition. He has also sent Margot a letter pretending to blackmail her. His monologue also reveals that both he and Schwan attended Cambridge University. Interestingly Tony became a Tennis professional and even played at Wimbledon, but ended up penniless, until he married Margot. Schwan, on the other hand became a small time con man with a police record and a History of extorting money, from vulnerable women. The viewer may well be inclined, to question the reputation of the legendary Cambridge University. However, given the times, it was entirely possible for a tennis professional to exhaust all his earnings, back then.

Tony, then pretends to drop the Mark’s letter on the floor. When Schwan courteously picks it up and hands it back to him, Tony gestures to Schwan to place the letter in the leather folio, he is holding amd is careful not to touch the letter with his own hands. How Tony managed to get the letter from the handbag, open the envelope and read its contents is beyond me. Did he sense he was on to something, and wear gloves?

Tony then blackmails Schwan, that he can implicate the latter as Margot’s blackmailer. He would use the fact that Schwan’s fingerprints are now on the letter, as evidence. Tony then tells Schwan how his devilish scheme is to unfold.

The following night, Tony and Mark will be away at the party. Before they leave, Tony will steal Margo’s key from her handbag, when she is not nearby, and hide it in the carpet of a stairwell, located beside the apartment in the same building. After they leave, Schwan is use this key to enter the apartment. He will conceal himself and wait behind the long curtains of a window, inside the apartment, in the living room, in proximity to a desk where the phone is located.

Tony will call the house at 10PM from the party. Margo will come to the living room answer the ringing phone, from her bedroom to answer the phone. Schwan would quietly step out of the curtain behind her and strangle her with a scarf. Then he will proceed to open a window, and create a mess in the apartment, to make the murder look like a burglary gone wrong.

The following night, things seem to go as planned, until Margot picks up the phone to answer Tony’s call. As expectd Schwan, who has concealed himself, behind the curtains of the apartment, quietly steps behind Margot and attempts to strangle her with a scarf. However, a frantic Margot, fighting for her survival, gets hold of a pair of scissors on the desk, and stabs her attacker to death.

Tony who has been on the phone, hears the entire struggle, and is shocked, when he hears a petrified but still-alive Margot tell him how things transpired. In a state of shock, Margot begs Tony to come home. Tony tells her that he will, but asks her not to call the police, until he arrives.

Vicious as a snake, Tony returns to the apartment, pacifies Margot , tells her to rest in the bedroom and then returns to the murder scene. He takes the key from the dead corpse, and places it back in the keychain in Margot’s handbag. He then cleverly places Mark’s letter on Schwan’s lifeless body to put in place, another fiendish plan. He then calls the police.

Chief Inspector Hubbard(Antony Dawson), who arrives on the scene interrogates Tony and Margot. After finding Mark’s letter on Schwan he assumes that Schwan has been blackmailing Margot about revealing the affair to Tony As a result, Hubbard presumes, that Margot invited Schwan to the apartment and then murdered him.

Margot is implicated and is put on death row. Can she be saved? Can Mark who trusts her, convince Hubbard to uncover the real truth? Is Tony’s master plan flawless, or has he made a faulty assumption. The rest of the plot will answer these questions.

Dial M for murder is a thrill ride, from start to finish. Ray Milland plays the psychopathic Tony, with style. He is the arch typical wolf in sheep’s clothing, a homicidal, ingenious monster, masquerading as a polished , well-mannered gentile. The rest of the cast, Robert Cummings, Anthony Dawson, and John Williams also put in decent performances.

Even with the single setting of the movie, the cinematography makes for great eye candy. The colors are pleasing and not too flashy, making the entire movie seem like a portrait in motion.

Grace Kelly is all grace and elegance , in playing Margot, and plays the rich, not so innocent but vulnerable and trusting lady. Her gorgeous attires blend in with the colors of the settings in every scene she is in, making the movie a beautiful visual experience. ‘Dial M for Murder’ will always remain a classic and is a must see for mystery movie fans.

Please continue below to read my review of “A Perfect murder ” and for a comparison of the two movies.

A Perfect Murder (1998)

Many critics refer to ‘A Perfect Murder’ as a remake of Hitchcock’s ‘Dial M for Murder’. However, the poster of ‘The Perfect Murder’, claims that it is based on the play by Frederick Knott’, and not on Hitchcock’s screenplay For this reason, I will describe it as an adaptation rather than a remake. In a future post, I will attempt dispel confusion among the terms, adaptation, remake, and homage.

‘A Perfect Murder’ is directed by Andrew Davis, a director known to make big budget action movies. It stars Michael Douglas, Gwyneth Paltrow and Viggo Mortensen. As might be expected from Davis, the movie is a far more ambitious enterprise , and extends the setting of of the movies from just a single apartment to include a rooftop art studio, New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, other Manhattan locales, a lavish apartment and more.

The dialogs also have been enhanced to be more contemporary and impactful. While preserving key elements of the original play, there are significant changes to the characters and screenplay, to make them more modern and relatable to a present day audience. Davis has also economized on the cast by blending the roles of the woman’s lover ,and the individual who is entrusted with murdering her into one character.

Luckily for Davis, he chose to remake the movie towards the end of the 90s, when mobile phones, CC cameras, and smart locks did not exist and land lines were still the norm. I doubt if any filmmaker would take on the challenge to update the movie, now or in the future.

The opening scene of the movie shows a large rooftop artist’s studio, on a high rise building. As the camera makes its way through the paintings, it reveals a bed where a couple, a young man and a woman, make love. The woman is revealed to be Emily(Paltrow), an heiress to a large fortune. She is married to middle-aged Steven Tailor (Douglas), a Wall Street executive. The young man is David Shaw, an artist who lives in and works out of the studio.

In the next scene, she comes to her own luxury apartment , when Steven politely welcomes her home, and offers her a drink. “To stolen moments”, Steven proclaims as he toast the occasion, hinting that he is aware of Emily’s secret.

Emily and Steven attend an even at a museum. Emily introduces Shaw to Steven, as her acquaintance and as a great artist. Shaw tells Steven that he graduated from the Berkley school of Music. Steven later contacts Shaw and arranges to meet with the latter in a diner, with the pretext of wanting to buy a painting. Here, like in the earlier movie , Steven pretends to accidentally drop a set of letters, that Shaw picks up and hands back to him. Shaw takes Steven to his roof top studio where Steven reveals his knowledge of Shaw’s illicit relationship with Emily.

To Shaw’s surprise, Steven tells him that he knows that Shaw is a con man, who preys on women, has served time and has never attended Berkley. Threatening to reveal these secrets to Emily, he recruits Shaw into murdering her. For further instructions, Shaw is to meet with Stephen privately at the apartment, which Steven shares with Emily.

At the meeting, Steven outlines a plan where Shaw is to murder Emily, when he, Steven is away for his weekly card game. This plan is almost identical with the plot described in ‘Dial M for Murder’ , except that Shaw is to enter the apartment through a service elevator, rather than the front door. As this is an upscale New York apartment, anyone visiting it should first be cleared by the security person. seated at the building’s entrance.

At this stage, the plot of the movie deviates from the screenplay of the play and its earlier movie adaptation. It has numerous additional original and well conceived twists thrown in. David Suchet later makes his appearance in the movie, masterfully playing Mohamed Karaman, a New York police official, investigating the case. His interactions with Emily are extremely engaging and heartwarming scenes, in the movie.

However, it is the enterprising Emily who will play sleuth and try to resolve the situation, in this adaptation of the movie. As mentioned earlier, “A Perfect Murder” is a well made adaptation with numerous modifications, made for a more contemporary audience. (Note however, that it was made in 1998.) The new twists added make it interesting, even to those who have seen “Dial M for Murder”

Douglas as Steven is radically different from Milland’s Tony. He is the brash rough talking assertive, polished New Yorker, but equally impressive and and fiendish as the well mannered English gentleman. Paltrow’s Emily is not the is blonde like Grace Kelly’s Margot ,but unlike the latter, is enterprising enough to smell a rat and seek the truth by herself. Mortensen’s Shaw is far more devious and cunning than both Schwan or David in “Dial M for Murder”. He can go toe to toe with Steven in a game of wits.

“It’s not happiness to see me, is it” is another memorable line from the movie.

In summary, you cannot go wrong in watching either of these two or both movies, in any order you prefer.