Dial M for Murder: Hitchcock’s perverse answer to the fifties 3-D craze - The Globe and Mail
Dial M for Murder: Hitchcock’s perverse answer to the fifties 3-D craze - The Globe and Mail:
Geoff Pevere writes in The Globe:
Dial M for Murder might be one of Alfred Hitchcock’s least essential movies – even he joked “I could have phoned that one in” – but it is essential that you see it in 3-D, if you see it at all. Working with a technology that was foisted on him and that he regarded with suspicion, he nevertheless proceeded to use the stereoscopic process with typical perversion, resulting in one of the most remarkable movies about lamps, sofas and scissors ever made.
Opening at Toronto’s TIFF Bell Lightbox in freshly digitized 3-D days before its Blu-ray release, Dial M for Murder (1954) is a modest hoot on the big screen, an exercise in getting maximum effect – and in-your-face artificiality – out of as few spatial and dramatic elements as possible. As concerned with the dynamics of perception and synthesis of depth as it is about Tony Wendice’s plot to have his cheating wife (Grace Kelly, in her first Hitchcock movie) murdered, Dial M suggests the kind of structuralist experiment Michael Snow might have conducted with a old plastic 3-D Viewmaster, some cardboard character cut-outs and a doll house.
Don't agree with his assessment of the film. But he's right--you gotta see it in 3D.
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