Dial M for Murder (1954) on Netflix
Tony Wendice, a former tennis player in London, learns that his wealthy wife Margot has been having an affair. He plots her murder so he can inherit her fortune.
- Netflix4.0/5
- IMDb8.1/10207,097 votes
- Rotten Tomatoes90%
Trailer
Plot summary
Margot Wendice's affair with Mark Halliday, an American crime writer, has ended, and Mark is back in London. Her husband Tony, a retired tennis professional who now works selling sports equipment, has known about the affair for some time. Over a year he has put aside small sums in one-pound notes, and he has picked Charles Swann, a Cambridge acquaintance who has drifted into petty crime, to enter the flat one night while Tony is at a party with Mark. Margot is to be at home alone.
Cast
- George Leighas Detective Williams
- George Aldersonas First Detective
Show all 20 cast
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about Dial M for Murder (1954)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- Hitchcock made Dial M for Murder only because another project collapsed. He had planned The Bramble Bush, from David Duncan's 1948 novel, with his Transatlantic Pictures partner Sidney Bernstein, but script and budget trouble ended the partnership and Warner Bros. let him scrap it.
- Warner Bros. shot the film with its own proprietary 3-D rig, the All-Media Camera. After a single preview on 18 May and four showings the next day, a Philadelphia theater manager frantically telephoned the studio to say people were staying away in droves, and asked permission to show it flat.
- The film closed out Hollywood's short-lived 3-D boom of the early 1950s, and Hitchcock had no illusions about the format: he called 3-D a nine-day wonder and said he had come in on the ninth day.
- Jeffrey Hatcher's 2022 stage version, approved by the Frederick Knott estate and opened at the Old Globe Theater in San Diego, kept the 1950s London setting but rewrote Max Halliday as Maxine Hadley, making Margot's affair a lesbian one.
