#15 in the Reverse Hitchcock project.
Frederick Knott’s stage play is very old-fashioned and faintly ridiculous, so the fact that this film, of which Knott wrote the screenplay, has a bit more flair and energy must be down to the director.
Tony (Ray Milland), a rather unconvincing former professional tennis player, has an unfaithful wife (Grace Kelly), who thinks he doesn’t know about her infidelity with an American writer (Robert Cummings). He’s icily polite to her as befits an English gentleman living in Maida Vale (the ‘M’ of the title), but he really wants to plan the perfect murder.
This mystery runs on latch-keys, a feckless fraudster turned assassin, and an incorrect telephone number. Kelly is not as coolly beautiful as she was in her other Hitchcock collaborations – she looks the part of a ’50s suburban housewife – but she has a moment to shine when the title’s murder does not quite work out as expected.
Cummings had worked for Hitch before, as the leading man of ‘Saboteur’ , but he’s better here, as a supporting player. Milland has a lovely scene where he blackmails the would-be killer just as if he is discussing the weather, while Anthony Dawson makes a fine desperado down on his luck who has been driven from stealing money to defrauding old ladies, to something far more sinister.
The would-be murder scene is scored with soaring music by Dimitri Tiomkin, and Kelly’s performance is quite excellent in this scene and the one immediately afterwards. Milland is also rather good, so whether Hitch brought out the best in his actors, or whether the editing process created the performances, they remain effective.
Filmed originally in 3-D, this has several ‘props in the foreground’ sequences but seeing it ‘flat’ doesn’t really detract from what is an entertaining, if light, entry in the director’s Canon. I’ve demoted it by half a star on this rewatch, but it is still a very good picture, and better than most of the time.