2 out of 5

Directed by: Alfred Hitchcock

‘Mary’ is the German-language version of ‘Murder!,’ shot at the same time as that film as part of studios’ brief, multi-language-production trend – a pursuit, as I cynically understand it, that was a fun capitalist dream of copy-and-pasting wares for as cost savings and money makings pitch, not quite gleaning that movie in language A doesn’t always easily play / profit the same in culture B – a point which ‘Mary’ maybe proved. It is not a shot-for-shot remake, though, to the extent that it does actually become a different film. However, assuming that a fair amount of people are watching this less-available German version as part of a Hitchcock viewing pursuit – as I am – it’s impossible not to consider it out of comparison to the other film – as I will…

Young actress Mary Baring (Olga Chekhova) is discovered in shock, bloodied weapon fallen at her side, by the body of a fellow actress. As her defense puts her in a fugue state for the murder itself, she truthfully allows it could have been her; still, there are odd discrepancies in the scenario that bother one member of the jury – famous stage actor Sir John (Alfred Abel) – though he ultimately gives in to pressure from the other jurors and delivers a guilty verdict: a death sentence. Guilt catches up to Sir John, however, and he teams up with some other actors from Mary’s troupe to suss out what actually happened, coming more and more to believe in Mary’s full-on innocence.

These beats are mostly the same as ‘Murder,’ though a quick time check will show that the runtime is some twenty minutes less. ‘Mary’ is generally considered the lesser of these two movies, and the excision of a lot of material is partially cited. I’m… on the fence there. While Hitchcock apparently tried to withhold changing the film too much to make it more “German” – and thereby less “British” – the majority of what’s cut out are either some somewhat taxing humorous beats, or extended sequences which, to me, suffered from Hitch’s style-over-substance indulgence. As to the former, I recognize that jokes landed differently back in the movie’s day, and there’s definitely something to trying to watch these films with mindfulness of the times, but the crossover period from silents to talkies for Hitch – if we bundle Mary and Murder together, they were his third talkies – still bore so many hallmarks of the former in terms of timing, and that’s what I see here: a kind of broad, reach-for-the-back-audience pantomime that doesn’t always work. Ironically – or maybe not – when it’s visual it does: an opening bit with a falling window pane and some hurried dressing is very funny, and that gets snipped out here; however, a laborious back-and-forth during jury deliberations where everyone berates Sir John doesn’t work, and that also gets mostly snipped out. In both cases, though, I’d argue the pace of the movie is greatly improved: Hitch constantly tried to code-switch between drama / thriller / comedy, and Murder was one of his clunkier efforts, in the sense that there are only a couple of points where it feels like the comedy bits enhance the scene, and aren’t just kind of stiff inserts. Yeah, they probably got a laugh at the time, but I just don’t know that they improve the movie outside of that, and so here I prefer Mary’s more straight forward scenes.

As to the latter – the extended, stylized sequences – these killed Murder, no pun intended. On a second viewing, I realized (I think) what Hitch was trying to do: the movie introduces what I have to believe is one of the earlier instances of an inner monologue: Sir John is shaving, and we hear his thoughts spoken aloud. In both Mary and Murder, the actor does not know what to do here; I imagine Hitch directing them to “think,” and just leaving it at that, so they stare dispassionately at their reflections. (I do wonder technical limitations prevented there from being any actual audio for them to respond to, like someone reading the lines from off-camera.) If you extend this concept to how the camera works in some scenes, drifting over details, it’s as though we’re meant to be taking in those details the same way Sir John is when surveying those scenes – but it’s delivered with the same dispassion. Both movies have parts of this, but it’s much less in Mary; in Murder, man, we just sit on some shots in silence for way too long, with Hitch dressing them up as much as possible, but it’s discordant with the tone of the scene – that disconnect is what creates the dispassion, along with just not having the film “language” to comfortably let the audience put pieces together, and so the camera stalls on shot A for beats too long, shot B for beats too long, and so on.

Now: in removing some of these things, we also admittedly remove some story elements that play in to Murder’s “twist,” and so Mary has a different one. However, that may have been / was more likely done out of some cultural sensitivity; either way, Murder’s reveal is already poorly handled; Mary’s change to it just renders the whole thing kind of pointless – it’s just a way to end the movie, and has no real resonance in the rest of it.

As a last major point of comparison, we have Murder’s Herbert Marshall playing Sir John versus Mary’s Abel. Marshall looks more the part of a famous actor, but he brings no internality to the role. Abel – despite his not getting along with Hitch (and that possibly affecting the storyline change as well) – does add that internality in, making his John much more convincing in his involvement in Mary’s happenstance. He doesn’t really look the part to me, but that really doesn’t matter when I found myself much more swept up in some key scenes versus the mirroring ones in Murder – though see again my thoughts on the pacing; its improvements surely helped there also. …Unfortunately, though, whereas Marshall’s supporting cast was a lot of fun, Mary’s is all pretty empty. The tradeoff of stripping the film of its humor is that it negates its other characters from having any / much personality.

Finally: Mary still isn’t a very good movie. It is better in some key regards by comparison to Murder!, but the streamlining that was done to knock of 20 minutes means the movie hardly has the space to really build up much importance around the murder and subsequent trial, and that’s necessary to have something to hang the rest of the movie off of. And while the “Sir John investigates” sequences dragggged in Murder!, when you cut those out… there’s hardly an investigation at all: it’s really like Sir John just has dinner out one night, finds a clue, and then we reveal the above-mentioned thing which, due to the plot snips, falls absolutely flat.