Kritiken

Sometimes taken to be a stagebound, minor work, Dial M for Murder is in fact one of the Master's signal achievements, underappreciated because it is so rarely seen in its original 3D format; no less than Lifeboat, Rope, or Rear Window, it was designed from the ground up around its unifying visual conceit.

While we're not about to make a case for the film's elevation to the ranks of the Hitchcock masterpieces, the film remains a wonder of technical and aesthetic invention, a masterclass in transforming ( but crucially not dispensing with) its dialogue-driven theatricality into something often startlingly cinematic.

Dial M for Murder is a pitiless, darkly hilarious act of self-excoriation, obsessed as it is with the mirror image of its creator, a man who not only depends on control for his livelihood, but also perversely sees it as a gateway towards true liberation.

For an artist like Hitchcock, [the 3D] gimmick could become wonderfully, sublimely expressive. Almost 60 years later its potential remains to be fully explored.

These ways celebrate the ability of film to transform whatever it touches. Wordsworth's sonnet in praise of sonnets celebrates what you can accomplish within a "scanty plot of ground." By embracing the theatrical trappings Dial M for Murder, Sir Alfred does more than tell a suspenseful tale. He fastidiously demonstrates that cinema's power is unpredictable.

In his wondrous HISTOIRE(S) DU CINEMA (1988-1998), Godard described Hitchcock as a poete maudit whose life's work pivoted on the role of the object. Through objects, which override the conventions of narrative and logic, Hitchcock became "the greatest creator of forms of the twentieth century...it is forms which tell us, finally, what there is at the bottom of things." DIAL M FOR MURDER is a great investigation into the prison of claustrophobia and the objects such fear leaves in its wake.