Film Review
Murder! has the distinction of
being Alfred Hitchcock's one and only true whodunit, in the mould of
the classic English murder mystery popularised by such writers as
Agatha Christie. Hitchcock's preference for suspense over
surprise is evident in this film which, whilst competently directed and
entertaining, lacks the master's distinctive touch, even though it
deals with a familiar Hitchcockian theme: the wrongful
arrest of an innocent person.
As in his preceding films, Hitchcock continues to explore the
possibilities that sound offers as a narrative device.
In Murder!, his great innovation is
the internal monologue, where the audience hears what a character is
thinking, not just what he is saying. This novel use of sound
illustrates Hitchcock's approach to cinema, in which filmmaking
technique (camerawork, editing, sound recording, etc.) are used to
bring in elements of subjectivity, thereby allowing the filmmaker
to heighten and control the audience's response, rather like a
conductor leading an orchestra.
In common with several of Hitchcock's early films,
Murder! explores the relationship
between life and art - in particular, how the two feed off one another
and how it is sometimes difficult to distinguish the one from the
other. The exaggerated theatricality seen in
Murder! (which is taken to almost
absurd limits by Herbert Marshall's overly mannered performance) makes
it hard to tell what is real and what is not - reminiscent of what we
find in Hitchcock's later film
Vertigo (1958). Perhaps
the boundary between life and art is not as clear-cut as we like to
think. With the increasing prevalence of closed circuit
television, satellite monitoring, web-cams, and the like, can we ever again be sure that what
we think of as life is not merely someone else's entertainment?
Not long after he had completed work on
Murder! Hitchcock was requested to
remake it for a German audience. This version, entitled
Mary, had a completely different
cast (which included Alfred Abel and Olga Tschechowa) and is generally
less well regarded than the British original.
With Murder! compounding the
success of his earlier
The Lodger
and
Blackmail, Hitchcock
realised by this stage that the crime-thriller was the genre for which
he was best suited, so it is no surprise that this genre would dominate
much of his subsequent output. Murder, mayhem and mystery was,
for most people, what Hitchcock was all about.
© James Travers 2008
The above content is owned by frenchfilms.org and must not be copied.
Next Alfred Hitchcock film:
Mary (1931)
Film Synopsis
Norah Baring, a member of a provincial theatre company, is arrested and
tried for the murder of a fellow actress. The jury finds her
guilty and she is condemned to death. One of the jurymen, the
well-known actor-manager Sir John Menier, has second thoughts after the
trial. Convinced of Mary's innocence, he begins his own
investigation to unmask the real killer...
© James Travers
The above content is owned by frenchfilms.org and must not be copied.