Last night we watched
Dial 'M' For Murder, often considered one of the lesser of Hitchcock's films. It's a bit of an odd duck, actually, in that the villain of the piece (played by Ray Milland) is actually portrayed very sympathetically and manages to have the audience rooting for him at times (Tammy wanted to see him get away with murder, even right up until the end!)
What struck me on this viewing of the movie, though, was just how much it resembled a typical episode of
Columbo, the TV show. Specifically:
- you see the would-be killer planning the crime beforehand
- you watch the execution of that plan
- attention is particularly paid to the little things that inevitably go wrong
- the police detective enters the proceedings after the crime has been completed (or at least attempted), and has to reverse engineer what happened in the face of superficial evidence pointing to another scenario
- the detective seems initially incompetent, but that's all just a cover for his eccentric manner of crime-solving
- the detective becomes the central figure, once he appears, and ends up unraveling the intricate scheme of the protagonist
In the case of
Dial 'M', the murder plot goes awry (with the intended victim actually killing, in self-defense, the pawn who was hired to do
her in, only to then be charged with
his murder!) and the Milland character has to improvise constantly as events play out differently than how he'd choreographed them... but other than that, it felt very much like any of dozens of
Columbos that I've watched over the past several decades. And that's high praise, indeed, for this longtime fan of Peter Falk's smarter-than-he-looks police inspector!
1 comment:
I thought exactly the same thing while watching it, but at first thought it was coincidence. So I was astonished when the detective left a room and then returned saying "just one more thing".
Surely Columbo must have been inspired in part by Dial M For Murder?
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