Alfred Hitchcock captures the pure bedlam that overtakes a neighborhood when their peaceful dreams are rudely disrupted by an awful din. As is customary everyone is in a foul mood, peers out their windows, bickers with everyone else, and moves into action.
Then in a split second, everything’s beastly still. The reason: The dead body lying on the floor discovered by the policeman making his rounds. The blunt instrument is at the feet of a disoriented young actress who looks to be the obvious culprit. But there has to be more to this story than what meets the eye. This cannot be as simple as we are led to believe. It’s a stellar environment to introduce a murder. Acting as one of Hitch’s few whodunits, Murder! involves itself with the rest of a stage acting troupe full of players.
Still, in the ensuing court hearing, the aspiring starlet, Diana finds her life on the line in the hands of a jury. Their deliberations feel a bit like 12 Angry Men (1957) as Sir John (Herbert Marshall) is hustled and hurried into coming to a guilty verdict by groupthink as the one remaining holdout.
In these sequences, there’s a sense that Hitchcock has a bit of frustration with the state of affairs with the legal system or if nothing else a great interest in its functions much like Fritz Lang did in pictures like M (1931), Fury (1936), and You Only Live Once (1937). But it’s truly a Hitchcock touch to have the pronouncement of death given as the camera continues to focus on a worker cleaning up the juror’s room. But it’s key that the story does not end here, rather like The Phantom Lady (over a decade later) there’s more to the story and only one man is interested in figuring it out. Because of his sheer fortitude, it’s understandable that he becomes our hero.
Sir John finds himself in a bit of a moral dilemma (as denoted with an early example of character voiceover) because he feels partially responsible for the problems assailing young Diana and he resolves to do something about it. Unfortunately, the film’s latter half slogs on a bit as Sir John calls upon the services of Ted Markum and his wife — two witnesses in the opening scene — to help close in on the real killer. The individual they suspect to be the culprit. However, the real trouble is not simply pinning the murder on this perpetrator but also figuring out how they did it.
A woman’s life hangs in the balance as the gallows sit menacingly in her future. Still, Hitchcock uses some cruel poetic justice to tie his story’s loose ends up. A trapeze act gets a lot more morbid than ever before and again Hitchcock returns to human tumult which livens up his picture moderately and makes Murder! truly worthy of its name. In such instances, there are obvious signs of the master at work. Otherwise, this is hardly Hitchcock’s most diverting offering in the genre.
3/5 Stars
In one sense Blackmail proves to be a landmark in simple film history terms but it’s also a surprisingly frank picture that Hitchcock injects with his flourishing technical skills. It’s of the utmost importance to cinema itself because it literally stands at the crossroads of silent and talking pictures and holds the distinction of being one of Britain’s first talkies.
What’s striking about Alfred Hitchcock is the sheer breadth of his work and how his career managed to take him in so many directions as he continued to evolve and experiment with his craft from silent pictures, to talkies, then Hollywood, and all the way into the modern blockbuster age. And yet the very expansiveness of his oeuvre begs the question, where to begin with it all? Certainly, his lineup of masterpieces in the 1950s are a must.
It looks like we’re staring into a black hole. Disorienting. Dark. Swirling around us. Our eyes adjust as our narrator begins his voiceover that will cover the majority of the film’s canvas. In this moment he talks about that initial spark, that moment of birth when humans leave the womb behind and see the light of day for the first time. In that same instance, we burst into the open air and realize that what we were looking at all along was the long dark tunnel from a moving train.
It’s happened in some well-documented cases that the same actor has played two characters that feel nominally similar and based on this cursory level of comparison the general public has been forever befuddled. You could cite some notable examples being Bogart playing Sam Spade and Phillip Marlowe the archetypal pulp private eye heroes of Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler.
In style if not entirely in execution The Lineup exhibits some similarities to Murder by Contract from the same year. Both films choose to take hit men as their main characters and it becomes a surprisingly intriguing way to look at a crime. Because the killers are a certain brand of sociopath who make film criminals all the more compelling based on not only on the way they carry themselves or the actions they take but the very words that leave their lips.
Like the fella says, in Italy for 30 years under the Borgias they had warfare, terror, murder, and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, and the Renaissance. In Switzerland they had brotherly love – they had 500 years of democracy and peace, and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock. 
Joseph Cotten is surprisingly compelling as the poor, unfortunate stiff and it’s hard not to feel sorry for him in his ignorance because we can relate with him. Alida Valli is striking as the aloof beauty who nevertheless has an unswerving affection for her former love that remains the only joyous thing in her current existence. Then, of course, there’s Orson Welles as the charismatic myth of a man–arguably the most intriguing supporting character there ever was even if it’s mostly thanks to the legend created by those who knew him.
Comic mayhem was always supercharged in the films of the 1930s because the buzz is palpable, the actors are always endowed with certain oddities, and the corkscrew plotlines run rampant with absurdities of their own. Penned by a pair of titans in Jo Swerling and Robert Riskin, The Whole Town’s Talking opens with an inciting incident that’s a true comedic conundrum.
4 Star Films 