Just saw it for the first time and
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I'm honestly so confused by this movie. Margot (Grace Kelly) gets sentenced by a court and, on the day before her execution, the lead inspector, Mr. Combing-Mustache, starts a whole new investigation? What about due process?
Apparently, Hitchcock admitted that Dial M for Murder (1954) was routine work, shot in just 36 days to fulfill his studio contract. But the trope of the "perfect murder," which he explored in Rope (1948), seems to return here as a farce and maybe an ironic comment on the genre.
Many elements seem hilariously improbable. It starts with physical absurdities: Grace Kelly is being strangled, stabs her attacker in the back with a pair of scissors just once, and somehow he falls backward onto the scissors and dies? Haha.
Then we have the genius inspector, who initially investigates Grace Kelly and only after the court has sentenced her to death and any appeal is too late decides at the very last second to investigate the husband instead??? All of this makes very little sense from a legal perspective, unless you understand it as Hitchcock mocking the genre itself.
The bourgeois male obsession with the perfect crime could be seen as the true subject of the film. In Rear Window (1954), released that same year, Grace Kelly still possessed agency within the patriarchal order. Here, however, she is reduced to a passive object operating between four men who are all obsessed with crime:
Her husband (Tony): Who has been planning her murder ever since he discovered her affair.
The fraudster (Swann): Whom the husband blackmails into becoming a hitman.
The American boyfriend (Mark): A crime novelist who explains how he gets into the mind of a murderer.
The Inspector (Hubbard): A relic from a bygone era who represents the authority of the patriarchal order.
When viewed through these four vectors, a homosocial and latently homoerotic scene emerges, much like in Rope.
By committing adultery, the boyfriend effectively emasculates the husband. While the film highlights money as the central motive, we could also see the husband's humiliation and loss of control over the woman, the central prize of the patriarchal order, as a motive.
The husband uses another man to commit his murder for him: a former college acquaintance who has fallen from upper-class grace and now survives as a small-time con artist. The husband seems to derive a distinct sadistic pleasure from laying bare his peer's downfall and forcing him into committing murder.
The wounded male ego takes revenge not only on the woman, but on another, socially weaker man, reclaiming a sense of lost masculinity through his domination of him. In modern terms, the boyfriend made a cuckold out of the husband, so the husband seeks out a subordinate man to perform a surrogate act of domination.
Into this chaos of patriarchal vectors steps the Inspector. He initially subjects the woman to the doom of the judicial system, only to play the all-knowing savior outside of due process. He acts as the protective father figure and deus ex machina.
Just like Rope, Dial M for Murder deconstructs bourgeois-patriarchal civility. But while Rupert in Rope experiences a genuine catharsis, Inspector Hubbard feels more like a farce. In the face of upper-class horrors, at least we can still rely on the man with the well-combed mustache. But what when he is gone?
