MURDER! (1930)

Alfred Hitchcock’s third sound film is a rare whodunnit. Opening well enough for an Early Talkie with a nifty panning shot floating by row-house windows as nosy neighbors stick their heads out to see what all the noise & fuss is about. Very Ernst Lubitsch! Turns out there’s been a murder! and all the evidence points toward struggling young actress Norah Baring. After a hauntingly still stop at the crime scene, we head to the courtroom where a jury is being charged by the judge. Most vote guilty, and the few holdouts don’t take long to flip, including that famous, knighted stage star Herbert Marshall. Yet only days later, he’s had a change of heart. Surely this sweet young girl must be innocent. Why he nearly hired her for his acting company. He’ll just have to investigate it himself! And with that change of heart, the film suddenly stops dead in its tracks. Much slower than Hitch’s first Talkie, the still quite watchable BLACKMAIL/’29, here everyone might be playing underwater. An occasional visual trick livens things up here & there, as does a scene for Marshall & Una O’Connor with her working-class kids invading his bed. But we mostly crawl to a standstill, when the script isn’t playing at class snobbery, until finally hitting on the real culprit, a half-caste ‘passing’ as white. (The actor looks vaguely Italian and minces extravagantly. Gay in the original Clemence Dale play? Something François Truffaut, uncontradicted by Hitchcock, assumes in their famous interview book HITCHCOCK/TRUFFAUT.) Four more uneven films followed before Hitch found his true voice with THE MAN WHO KNEW TOO MUCH in 1934.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID: The current DVD from Kino/Lorber includes the German-Language version shot by Hitch at the same time with a different cast. Worth a look for improvements in early sound technique (note the better audio balance in a tricky scene with voice-over & Wagner playing on the radio); and for the casting of a very straight/very Aryan ‘half caste.’