The director displays a subtle mastery, eschewing ambitious set pieces and instead offering a quietly imaginative rendering of one British apartment. Hitchcock uses his camera to turn Knott’s play into a claustrophobic and dynamic experience, all without substantially altering its text or undermining its inherent theatricality. Hitch is right to believe that Dial M for Murder isn’t a match for his later, vertiginously towering achievements - but as an example of coasting, a director could do much worse. In his famed conversations with Francois Truffaut, Hitchcock points to the film of an example of his “coasting,” and the dialogue quickly moves on to his later masterpieces. Dial M for Murder, which Alfred Hitchcock adapted with precision from a hit play by writer Frederick Knott, was not a film the director particularly liked.
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