2 out of 5

Directed by: Alfred Hitchcock

By the time of Alfred Hitchcock’s third talkie, Murder!, it’s clear that his sensibilities as a director – and his confidence in employing them – have mostly settled in, encompassing his willingness / desire to experiment: tonal switching from pantomime style comedy to extreme drama; favoring a pristine scene setup over the “reality” of that moment; very purposeful pans and framing to control our attention and timing; and a general playfulness – an eye towards subverting our expectations of a particular moment.

But these are all techniques; devices for storytelling, but not necessarily tied to actually telling the story. It’s something that’s been present in Hitch’s work from the start: if he’s disinterested in the material, the film only hangs on whatever visual trickery fascinates him; and in instances where he is invested – cowriting here with his wife, I’d think that to have been the case – by the time of Murder!, he still hasn’t quite grasped the difference between telling an effective tale formatted to a 90-120 minute moving picture spectacle, and stringing along punctuations of images or moments with dialogue dropped inbetween. It was a skill / craft he’d just begun excelling at as the silent era ended, and talkies threw a new wrench into that mix, with Murder! exemplifying how much that kinks up the works.

Admittedly, this is from a decades-later POV; I understand that pacing was a different beast back in the day, and a crowd was maybe more in need of / willing to take long stretches between more meaningful moments, and the balance of what was needed to be spoken aloud versus shown versus intuited was surely different. All the same, I’m trying to assess these films with as much awareness of that as I can afford, and more directly trying to ask: what is the intention of this scene, or of this shot? Intention doesn’t have to be anything more than “this is so the audience has a breath,” or “this is to visually connect scene A to B” – it doesn’t have to be deep – but so often in Murder! it feels more like Hitchcock was, as ever, just experimenting with tone, and he’d become so competent at framing and cool imagery and whatnot that maybe it got a pass.

I dunno. Much shorter: this film drags. It is not helped by an insanely unengaging performance from lead Herbert Marshall, who I understand is handsome and has a great, stern voice, but has so little expressiveness to carry the many silent beats where he’s meant to be thinking through a scene that said scenes just fall flat. But in addition to this, there’s the sense that, in adapting a detective novel to screen, Hitch and co-writers Walter Mycroft and Alma Reville maybe thought that some tenser passages that where something is being described in great detail could be matched by letting the camera just drift on a set, and perhaps let Marshall’s Sir John or his eventual compatriot Ted (Edward Chapman) simply rattle off an inventory of what we should know, allowing for long, long pauses inbetween. Hitch will generally set this up with some very slick pans, and almost always find some great angles and shadows to use, but it doesn’t change the disconnect between story and visuals – the former being pretty bland; the latter trying to tell us something really serious is happening, and if you dare to pay attention, you’re staring at a silent, fairly unmoving / unmotivating screen for minutes on end.

Compressed down to 60 minutes, this would make for a (culturally dated, but) good procedural: actress Diana Baring (Norah Baring) is discovered next to a dead body of a fellow actress, a blood-stained bludgeon lying next to her, with no memory of how should found herself as such. Diana is put on trial, with her lawyer claiming the incident occurred during some type of fugue state; some doubts amongst the jury are steamrolled over by those convinced of Diana’s outright guilt – there is some fascinating social and gender and class commentary amongst the jury’s bickering, that could’ve served as a stronger focus for the film – and Diana is convicted. One of those jurors, famous actor Sir John, begins to double back on the verdict, and starts up an investigation to prove her innocence, bringing in the aforementioned Ted and his wife (Phyllis Konstam) to assist.

The opening lead-in to the murder and the jury sequence are actually pretty fantastic: as we’ve again seen in Hitch films up to this point, he tends to have a very strong grasp of key moments, and then the rest of the film gets colored in much more loosely. That looseness kicks in at about the 20 minute mark, post trial, and continues from there.

Chapman and Konstam are a joy, providing some comedic counterpoints to Marshall’s rich playboy type, but also proving competent as needed. And despite my ragging on Marshall, when he’s not asked to just stand there stiffly and look at things, he can be charming, but the space between these blips are so long it’s hard to appreciate. The mystery itself is also pretty good, though we’re still “learning” the language of movies, and there are a few too many character names thrown in, as well the aforementioned book-to-screen effect making for a mix of scenes that felt truly derived for film, and some that were (perhaps) transported too directly or just improperly for the format. And to repeat again: it’s just too long. Nearly every scene after that opening struggles with that sensibility, and it’s only the novelty of seeing some (at the time, and even now) entrancing visuals on screen that I feel like could’ve kept viewers from squirming restlessly in their seats.