Dial M for Murder (1954)
Directed by Alfred Hitchcock
When her American lover visits London, a wealthy woman’s jealous husband hatches a plan to murder her and inherit her fortune.
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What critics compared Dial M for Murder to
And the most arresting element of this look -- and the homage to Hitchcock -- is the film's title sequence, in which the credits hang in the midair of Manhattan with an eerie holographic effect, winking at both the discordant opening of "North by Northwest" and 3-D of "Dial M for Murder."
Its intertwining schemes and bungled cons recall Hitchcock's Dial M for Murder; its first half, with a brooding lower class heroine shipping off to a country manor has shades of Jane Eyre.
From "Rear Window" we have Ms. Pfeiffer's nosy wife spying on the neighbor next door (who, imagine this, she suspects of murdering his wife!) with binoculars; from "Psycho" there are many frightening shower scenes - including one in which Ms. Pfeiffer brings down the shower curtain; there are also "Vertigo" and "Dial M for Murder" references which, for spoiler's sake, should not be revealed.
We sneered at A Perfect Murder, a remake of Hitchcock's Dial M for Murder.
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Like Hitchcock's Dial M For Murder in which we're essentially rooting for someone to get killed, you sit in the audience anticipating the big win — which is for our guys to be proven right and get a monstrous pay-out on their “shorts,” but for the entire planet to quake from instability.
“Panic Room,” the director’s most underrated film, contains all of the stylistic and narrative shades of a “Dial M for Murder.”
This sort of helpless damsel-in-distress stuff has been done to death over the years, with Hitchcock alone using it as a vehicle for both Joan Fontaine in “Suspicion” and Grace Kelly in “Dial M for Murder.”
As to Hugo’s 69-year-old director, Martin Scorsese sends the pendulum back to the past via multiple eras: through the inception of cinema in the 1890s; through the teeming bustle of the life within the glorious train station, Gare Montparnasse, of the 1930s; and, calling on the filmmaker’s earliest fascination with 3D in the 1950s (Alfred Hitchcock’s Dial M for Murder and André de Toth’s House of Wax ), his pendulum reverses, sweeping over the present, delivering his impeccable take on modern 3D technology like nothing we’ve ever seen.
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An auteur like Alfred Hitchcock, with classics like Rope (1948), Dial M For Murder (1954), and Psycho (1960) to his name, perfected the art of the genre.
Sketched out on paper in its entirety, the story looks an awful lot like one of Alfred Hitchcock’s seedier “criminal mischief” films (Shadow of a Doubt [1943]; Strangers on a Train [1951]; Dial M for Murder [1954]; Marnie [1964]).