Dial M for Murder
Short description
Tony Wendice is a former tennis star who married Margot for her wealth and now lives off her money. When Margot becomes involved with Mark Halliday, an American crime novelist, Tony fears that a divorce would leave him penniless. He therefore arranges for a man from his past, Charles Swann, to kill her, and builds himself a careful alibi for the night of the crime. Margot survives the attempt on her life, but the circumstances turn against her, and Tony works to direct suspicion toward his own wife. A police inspector, Chief Inspector Hubbard, gradually untangles the case.
Alfred Hitchcock directed and produced this crime thriller, the twenty-ninth of the forty-three films he directed in chronological order, arriving between Rear Window and To Catch a Thief. Frederick Knott wrote the screenplay, adapting his own stage play. Ray Milland plays Tony, Grace Kelly plays Margot, Robert Cummings plays Mark Halliday, and John Williams plays Chief Inspector Hubbard, among a credited cast of twenty-two. Warner Bros. Pictures produced the film on a budget of about one million dollars.
On IMDb, the film holds a rating of 8.1 out of 10 from roughly 204,000 votes, and on TMDB it stands at 8 out of 10 from around 2,950 votes. A critics' rating of 7.6 out of 10 from 48 reviews places it somewhat below the audience scores.
What's left behind the scenes
- Alfred Hitchcock's cameo – a photo from a reunion (one of Hitchcock's most inconspicuous cameos).
- For close-up shots of the phone, large-scale models of a finger and a phone were built, as the camera could not focus on a regular phone.
- The film was shot in 36 days.
- The film was originally shot in 3D.
- Alfred Hitchcock (1899-1980) chose an expensive red velvet peignoir for Grace Kelly (1929-1982) in the scene where she is talking on the phone. Kelly protested, stating that no woman in the world would wear such a thing to answer the phone when she was alone and already in bed. According to Kelly, a woman would answer the phone in her nightgown. Hitchcock admitted she was right, he liked the resulting scene, and subsequently allowed her to decide all wardrobe matters for herself in all of his films.
- The Warner Bros. studio insisted on filming in 3D, even though public enthusiasm for it was waning, and Alfred Hitchcock himself was confident that the film would ultimately be released in a conventional format. He wanted the first shot of the film to show a finger dialing 'M' on a rotary phone, but the 3D camera was unable to properly capture the close-up. The director therefore ordered a giant finger and a corresponding oversized phone dial to be made of wood.
- Warner Bros. literally forced Alfred Hitchcock to make this film, citing contractual obligations. He was so uninterested in what was happening on set that the director stated he could easily have given instructions by phone, and the film would not have suffered for it.
- During the filming of the murder scene, Alfred Hitchcock even lost weight due to worry. He ran rehearsal after rehearsal, and then shot numerous takes to capture the entry of the scissors into the body exactly as he envisioned it.
Auditions in India
Casting calls in USA
Castingi w Polsce
Кастинги в Україні
