Murder!

I feel like there's a surprising bit to talk about with Murder! (I'll be omitted the exclamation point from here on out), but I also wonder if it's fair to criticize it for the issues it has, due to circumstance. Murder is a wrong-person-accused story, something that would become Hitchcock's bread and butter in short time. But here, it's very early in his career. So early, this is only his third talkie. Therein lies issue #1. This was, from some reports, initially intended to be a silent movie, but then retro-fitted, and it shows. There are silent-movie era transitions, odd pauses, and an overall presentation that comes off with that stagey, silent-movie era feel to it. I'm not knocking silent movies. I've only seen a few, but I've liked quite a few of the ones I've seen. But this doesn't feel specifically written to be a talkie; it feels like one movie forcibly converted into another. And it doesn't help that post-dub sound wasn't a thing, so there is no score here. The tension all has to come from the acting and dialogue. And therein lies issue #2: the script. The movie concerns a woman who is wrongfully accused of murdering a rival. She doesn't remember portions of the evening, and what she does remember, she's unwilling to say, so she's convicted and sentenced to death. But one of the jurors, who knows her through work, feels bad, and believes she's innocent because ... because ... well, because. Murder never adequately explains why he thinks she's innocent. He just ... has a hunch? Trusts her tone of voice? Thinks she's cute? Any or all of these could be it, and that's all you get. And so, he -- a theater manager and playwright, NOT an investigator -- goes on a mission to prove her innocence. He is the main focus of the movie, not her. She is a plot device, a mystery box to open. So we the audience watch as he talks, and talks, and talks, and talks his way around London. There's no exciting chases, no cat-and-mouse games ... just conversations. Lots of conversations. Dry, emotionless, detail-oriented conversations. It is precisely less interesting than it sounds. And while the lead, Sir John, is stiff and proper and unrelatable, the accused, Diana, is bizarre. She smirks and has a cheerful tone of voice as she is on the witness stand, but she's vacuous when talking about most anything else. She doesn't come off as innocent, and in fact, she's portrayed so weirdly, there's more reason to think she's guilty. But again, I go back to wondering if this is circumstance, the bias of seeing a 94 year old movie with modern eyes. It's like a kid of 2024, after having heard the music of today, going back and hearing The Beatles. At the time, the things they did in the studio were revolutionary. Now, they're quaint. We wouldn't have the layered complexities in music we enjoy now and take as standard issue if it weren't for The Beatles pioneering them, but going back and hearing them be the first doesn't invoke a sense of wonder, because you can hear them putting together the components we already see as a completed structure. I wonder if that's the problem with Murder. It is a predecessor to an entire genre that we have all lived with for decades. Movies like Double Jeopardy and The Fugitive and even My Cousin Vinny do the wrongfully-accused genre so well, because they have decades of streamlining and perfecting behind them. Murder is where those decades start. In a way, holding it accountable for failing to be what these kinds of movies would become is coincidental to the genre itself. Should I hold it accountable for crawling so The Fugitive could run (pun very much intended)? It seems unfair of me. I think that's why, despite the harsh things I've said, I won't go lower than dead-in-the-middle average on the score. This laid groundwork. This helped start a genre that the director himself would make into a goldmine, even before the decade in which this came out was over. It's not that Murder is bad. It's just very, very basic. It is the wrongfully-accused genre at its simplest, most rudimentary form. For that, I appreciate it. But, unless you're a Hitchcock completionist (like me) or you can divorce yourself from years of movie-watching prejudices and judge it strictly within the bubble of 1930, I can't recommend Murder to anyone.