1950s Themes Dial M For Murder Strangers On A Train Rear Window

Purgatorial theme Dial M (1954)… Concerns a husband’s elaborate attempt to murder his adulterous wife. When the murder fails, the husband is nearly successful in framing her for murder. H. considered it a minor work, but is filled with tiny details of hands, shadows and keys than most directors could manage on a wide-screen spectacle. There is a perverse shot of the inner workings of the phone when the husband actually inserts the coin for the call to signal the murder of his wife. This includes the close up of the husband as he actually begins the call by dialing their phone number…which begins with the letter M.

The film begins with scenes of the wife kissing first her husband and then her lover which establish her deceptiveness and betrayal of her marriage, almost justifying her husband’s attempt to have her murdered. Her trial is filmed through close-ups, with colored lights revolving around her against a natural background, creating audience tension and a sense of the wife’s purgatorial experience. As with most of H’s heroine’s, she is photographed as ravishing but undergoing terrible ordeals, which are the price she must pay for her beauty. Murdered wives became an obsession of H’s films in the 1950s…Strangers on a Train, I Confess, Dial M, Rear Window, Vertigo all contain this theme.

The names of the menaced or murdered heroines all begin with the letter “M” in the films Strangers…, Dial M…, Vertigo, Psycho, The Birds, Marnie. Although H’s wife was named Alma, he always referred to her as “Madame.”

Helpless witness Rear Window (1954)… Hitchcock received his third Oscar nomination for this film The hero is immobilized in a wheelchair after an accident and passes the time by looking through binoculars at the events transpiring in the apartment block opposite. He slowly begins to suspect one of the occupants of having killed his wife, and tries to convince his nurse, girlfriend, and a police friend of the validity of his suspicions. The triumph of the film is its ability to operate on many levels and to galvanize something cinematically through montage from a situation that is basically static.

Disturbing moral tone Rear Window LB Jeffries is a peeping Tom, can one truly endorse his behavior? The film undertones suggest that Jeffries almost wills the man to become a murderer in order to brighten up his own temporarily dull existence The film is often seen as an allegory of the film-going experience, with the block of apartments across the courtyard representing the movie screen and with LB Jeffries being a sort of filmgoer who projects his own fantasies onto the characters he sees, identifying with some and rejecting others, but above all yearning for them to provide him with excitement.

The film also reflects the era of McCarthyism in America with an atmosphere of paranoia and betrayal. Jeffries binds his vision together with a subconscious fear of marriage…does bachelorhood mean freedom or loneliness? Is marriage harmony or chains? The newlyweds are in direct contrast with the husband who is suspected of chopping up his wife, and love that has turned to hate. Jeffries’ voyeurism is a way of postponing the day that he must look into his own soul ask determine what it is that he really wants. The outrage of the woman upon the murder of her dog is a statement reflecting society, one where people know the truth but will not get involved, and who are onlookers only seeking entertainment