Two weeks ago, I used the clip shown above—a detailed analysis of an early scene from Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo supplied by “Nerdwriter1”—largely as a springboard for discussing a persistent “windows motif” that runs through the picture. Today I want to talk about what the two characters in this scene “Scottie” (Jimmy Stewart) and Gavin Elster (Tom Helmore) are talking about and how it relates to other scenes in Hitchcock’s films.
Scottie and Gavin went to college together but haven’t seen each in years. Scottie is a former police detective, forced to retire when his vertigo is the cause of a fellow officer’s death. Gavin, whose marriage has made him extremely wealthy, tells Scottie that his (Gavin’s, that is) wife is behaving very strangely, and he would like an old, trusted friend to figure out what’s going on.
Being Hitchcock, of course, there’s more to this story than meets the eye. Scottie is being set up to take part in an elaborate charade that will allow Gavin to murder his wife and use Scottie’s testimony to convince everyone that her death was a suicide. As deceptions go, this is fairly straight forward, although a first-time audience won’t know that Scottie and they have been fooled until about two thirds of the way through the picture. And, for Scottie, “solving” the case only deepens his despair.
Hitchcock being Hitchcock, it’s rare to find one of his films that doesn’t involve deception, but I’m particularly fond of scenes of “double deception”, when one character sets out to deceive another and then finds, too late, that he himself is caught when his plot is turned against him. An excellent example occurs in Hitchcock’s 1954 film Dial M for Murder, based on the play by Frederick Knott, who also scripted the film. Ray Milland is aging ex-tennis star Tony Wendice who discovers that he’s lost the affections of his wife Margot (Grace Kelly), which, he fears, might also lead to the loss of her bank account. The first twenty minutes of the film acquaint us with Tony, Margot, and Margot’s quasi-Platonic lover Mark Halliday (Bob Cummings). Tony, playing the innocent, bundles the two of them off to a play and then makes a strange phone call about buying a car, asking if the owner would be willing to come to his flat to make the sale, claiming falsely to have twisted his leg.
What follows is twenty-two minutes of elegant intrigue. The car’s supposed owner, the supposed “Captain Lesgate"(Anthony Dawson), is a second-rate hustler, a gentleman fallen on hard times, hoping to make a quick three hundred quid with no questions asked, but finds too late that he’s a small fish about to be swallowed by a larger one. It seems the two know each other. Of course, we were at Cambridge together! And your name isn’t Lesgate! It’s Swann! Well, this calls for a drink! A real drink!
Swann probably isn’t too happy about having to acknowledge his true identity, but the two settle down, sitting across the table from one another, each with his own light source.
Having unmasked his guest, Tony now unmasks himself, filling Swann in on all his troubles, both financial and matrimonial, joining Swann on the couch as he does so, and putting a light between them, something Hitchcock never tired of.
Swann, of course, isn’t interested in Tony’s troubles, no matter how genial and plummy his host’s tone. He just wants to make a little money and be gone. But genial Tony won’t let him get away, retreating a little as his story grows more shocking, to the point of confessing to Swann that he even began to think of ways to murder his wife! Actually kill her!
Tony continues to back off, attaining full distance when he explains why he stopped thinking of ways to murder his wife. You see, I won’t have to, because you’ll do it for me!
Milland is charming and self-assured, Dawson nervous and defensive. Everything is happening too fast, and Swann’s sure he’s going to end up the fall guy. But Tony says he’s got everything worked out. In an intriguing sequence, filmed by Hitchcock with the camera almost directly overhead of the actors, Tony “blocks out” the murder for Swann: “You’ll come through the front door and hide behind these curtains. I’ll call my wife at eleven. When the phone rings, you’ll see the light come on under her bedroom door. She’ll walk to this table. You’ll be standing right behind her.”
It sounds plausible, and Swann doesn’t have much choice, since Tony is threatening to reveal all of Swann’s little hustles, leaving him broke at best and serving a long stretch in prison at worst. Of course, Swann doesn’t know what’s really going to happen, that Margot is going to stab him to death with a pair of scissors. But all that happens later.1
Hitchcock’s Psycho, which I’ve discussed in detail here, has a similar scene, with similarly fatal results for the deceived deceiver, in this case Milton Arbogast (Martin Balsam2), the private detective hired to locate the missing Marion Crane. Like Swann, Arbogast is a shrewd, small-time hustler who ends up in over his head, literally so, once Norman (Anthony Perkins, of course) sinks both him and his car in the Stygian swamp abutting the Bates Motel.
The dreary, half-lit business office of the motel make a great contrast with Tony and Margot’s elegant flat. Illumination comes from one bulb, providing some seriously harsh “noir” illumination for the scene.
After the first shot, Arbogast and Norman are rarely shown together, Hitchcock cutting back and forth between them, gradually tightening close-ups, particularly of the tremulous Norman, who rather resembles one of his “helpless, passive” birds.
Unlike Swann, who finds himself more or less a pawn from the get-go, it is Arbogast who takes charge of his conversation with Norman, hectoring and probing, a professional smoothie who’s handled dozens of hicks before. He talks Norman into showing him the motel register. Norman does so and then “leans into” this extraordinary shot, examining the register, or pretending to, while chewing nervously on some candy.
Arbogast eventually pushes Norman into virtual silence, desperately shaking his head “no” to every question, but then goes even further, goading Norman into saying something he wishes he hadn’t said: “Maybe she [Marion] fooled me, but she didn’t fool my mother,” a doubly inconvenient statement, because now Arbogast will want to speak with Mrs. Bates, who isn’t receiving these days.
As the scene ends, both men seem to be fading to black. Norman is already there, of course, and Arbogast will soon be joining him.
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- Once you actually get past the killing of poor Swann, the rest of Dial M for Murder is a bit of a downhill run—lots cleverness that doesn’t quite hang together. It was remade as The Perfect Murder in 1998 with Michael Douglas and Gwyneth Paltrow, when, to my mind, the second half proved better than the first. ↩︎
- I’ve read that Balsam got the part on the basis of his “particularly unattractive smile”. When the shot-for-shot remake of Psycho was announced in 1997, I said to myself “William H. Macy will play Arbogast,” and I was right. ↩︎
