Murder! (1930) - film review

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...

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

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