Alfred Hitchcock
Murder!

Even masters have to start somewhere, and Murder! (1930) is one of Hitchcock’s first sound experiments. Like all experiments, something didn’t quite work. The title with its exclamation mark promises electrifying thrills, but in the end it feels more like a cough or even an existential question. Murder? would have been more honest, something like, "Excuse me, was there a murder here?"

I first saw it on television as an impressionable little girl (and above all totally lacking sharp critical tools), and it seemed a well-made, intriguing film—with even a surprising ending. An adult rewatch revealed cracks as deep as canyons and dust straight from grandma’s attic.

The plot rides on a theme dear to Hitchcock: the innocent accused—this time served up with a side of amateur theater. The story starts off decently enough, with Diana Baring, an actress found catatonic next to the corpse of a colleague in a crime scene staged like a macabre theatrical set. Blood-stained dress, murder weapon at her feet: all that’s missing is a “GUILTY” sign hanging around her neck. Her defense is as nonexistent as the budget for the sets, her reputation destroyed faster than a house of cards in a tornado, and her vague, passive attitude serves the death penalty up on a silver platter.

But among the jurors is Sir John Menier, a wealthy actor, full of initiative and just megalomaniacal enough to play at armchair detective. With the help of Doucie and Ted Markham, two more theatricals looking for a role in real life, he decides Diana is protecting someone.

The investigation moves backstage with all the grace of an elephant in a china shop: minimal sets, endless dialogues that flow like molasses, the camera as still as a security guard glued to his chair during a night shift. It doesn’t help that in the original version Doucie is even chattier than a door-to-door salesman, and her voice sounds like the classic nails on a chalkboard. Everything points to Hitchcock still thinking in theatrical terms, forgetting he was making a film.

Yet at least two scenes deserve a mention: the one where Menier shaves while talking to himself, a revolutionary (for the time) inner monologue made audible thanks to pioneering use of prerecorded sound, and the circus-like finale, which still manages to retain a sliver of surprise.

It’s not the film that crowned Hitchcock the master of suspense, nor is it something you’d watch for the fifth time with popcorn in hand. It’s more of a museum curiosity, a Hitchcock cutting his teeth like an apprentice pastry chef trying to figure out how to ice the cake—that is, how to turn a stage drama into a movie without making it look like a filmed school play.