The second dip into my Hitchcock box set turns up Dial M For Murder, and I’m very glad this isn’t the one I started with. It’s an adaptation by Frederick Knott of his own hit play, and sadly it retains that feel even with a director as skilled as Hitchcock helming the screen version.

Hitchcock would have been attracted by the plot, which is clever stuff featuring a woman who is married to a man she doesn’t love, and having an affair with another. It’s too clever if anything: the story is all about the twists and turns that transpire when the husband tries to get his wife killed by an old university acquaintance. All that happens in a smartypants opening scene when the potential murderer is invited by the husband, who reveals how much of how he knows of his old contact’s dastardly doings. It’s all ‘I followed you and saw you do this with Miss X’, ‘All very well, but how are you going to account for your knowledge of Miss X?’, ‘I have no need to, because…’. Because I’m cleverer than you, and cleverer than the audience, is what it amounts to.

Oh, and this is another Hitchcock movie that features a tennis player in a lead role. Hmm. Maybe there’s something about the gentleman tennis player that makes them admirably suited to roles as morally ambiguous dilettantes, hustling to make a living on the circuit but keeping an eye out for a well-heeled woman to support them in the style etc. What would the millennial equivalent be? Reality show winners maybe? They fit the profile, but most of them lack the headmeat to convincingly participate in a circuitous scam. Though the thought of a Shane Black scripted story inspired by Jade Goody is intriguing…

The problem with adapting a stage play that takes place all in a flat is that it’s not very interesting watching the same flat when the story is told on a screen. And I found some of the edits unnatural rather than immersive, as if Hitchcock was struggling to find new angles to see the story from because he felt exactly the same constraint. It’s all flat in that flat, the mews not a muse. The only respite comes in a scene in which Grace Kelly as the wife goes through an abstracted version of her trial, amplified voices coming at her from all sides (well, one, this being mono, but you get the idea) against a backdrop of shifting colours that gets darker as the fast-forwarded narrative takes us to the reveal that she’s going to be executed. It’d be interesting to see modern filmmakers use similar methods: as a way of getting through otherwise tiresome exposition to get to the emotional meat it’s one of the film’s few winning features.

Emotional meat is precisely what Dial M is lacking. You’d think Grace Kelly’s lover would be worked up about her incarceration, but he treats it as a chance to work through what’s happened as if it’s one of the plots for the crime novels he writes, no passion apparent. At least Kelly looks suitably stressed at some points: given that she’s the subject of an attempted murder and then sentenced to death for planning one herself, it’s something you’d like to take for granted. But this is a world where men wear homburgs and drink port from decanters, and wearing your heart on your sleeve is clearly not the done thing. Some cove would only knife it, and then where would you be? Standing about all forlorn asking passers by for a handkerchief to bandage your bloody arm, that’s where.

So, second dip into the Hitchcock goody bag and this time I plucked a duffer. Four more to go, one of which is North By Northwest, and I know that’s a winner having seen it already.