Alfred Hitchcock's Murder! (1930)

In Alfred Hitchcock’s early talkie Murder! a non-binary person may be the key as a veteran actor employs his art within a series of real-life plays to solve a murder.

A travelling troupe of British music hall actors is awakened in the early hours by a clattering hubbub. This opening sequence is shot in the style of the German Expressionist directors but in Hitchcock’s droll manner. It turns out that one of the actors was murdered.

Long shadows and Expressionist montage of the German silent film era heighten the drama of Alfred Hitchcock’s Murder!

Edna Druce (Aileen Despard—uncredited) is found dead on the floor of the room her colleague and rival Diana Baring (Norah Baring). Baring sits in a chair next to the body; her right hand hangs limply close to the handle of the fireplace poker which apparently slew Druce. Gordon Druce (Miles Mander) howls drunkenly that Baring has slain his wife. This scattershot series of these and other impressions make for assumptions which quickly become the facts of a homicide for which Baring is charged, tried, and convicted.

Circumstantial evidence shaded with personal biases become the facts which convict Diana Baring (Norah Baring) for the murder of a fellow actor in Alfred Hitchcock’s Murder! (1930).

The narrative develops as a series of “plays” as Sir John Menier (Herbert Marshall), an aristocratic stage actor, teases out what he refers to as “the inner history” of this criminal misadventure. The first play is the clattering hubbub that leads to a crime scene. The second opens through a Judas window rising on the door of Baring’s prison cell, which becomes a curtain rising on a music hall romantic farce. In this play, actors cross-dress as comical policemen and campy women while actual police backstage go through the motions of questioning witnesses regarding the Druce murder between the actors’ stage cues.

A jury foreman (R. E. Jeffrey) and majority browbeat a unanimous verdict from the remaining dissenter in Alfred Hitchcock’s Murder! (1930)

The third play is Baring’s trial, a set piece at the Old Bailey. The fourth is fifteen minutes of spirited jury deliberation which combines several Hitchcock hallmarks: a tyrannical majority misguided by conventional biases, a music-hall comic element, and Expressionist cinematography which heightens the drama of a jury foreman (R. E. Jeffrey) and majority browbeating a unanimous verdict from three standouts who become a sole dissenter—Sir John.There is a verdict.

Sir John Menier (Herbert Marshall) resolves to discover the “inner history” of a crime after reluctantly voting to convict an alleged murderer in Alfred Hitchcock’s Murder!

However, Sir John, admitting that he was “so caught up in the machine that makes these things that I followed the popular sentiment”, is troubled by the evidence. He undertakes his own investigation of the crime, attempting “to apply the techniques of my art to a problem of real life”. He enlists the help of the troupe’s manager Ted Markham (Edward Chapman) and his wife Doucie, an actress (Phyllis Konstam) to get to the bottom of what happened. This fifth play involves a sixth “play-within-the-play” which Sir John compares to “The Mousetrap” in Act III, Scene 2 of “Hamlet”, wherein to catch the conscience of the real perpetrator.

Social distancing: an aristocratic actor (Herbert Marshall) meets a music hall confrere; the music hall impresario uneasily crosses boggy class territory.

It may surprise viewers now that a non-binary person may be the key to solving this old-fashioned murder mystery. Handell Fane (Esme Percy, a leading interpreter of George Bernard Shaw’s plays) is a member of the troupe who appears as a male, though whom one fellow actor refers to as a “hundred-percent he-woman”, another as a “female impersonator”, and a third as a “half-caste”. Because the troupe broke up after the murder, Sir John and his allies locate Fane in his old standby role: a female circus acrobat.

Handell Fane (Esme Percy, a leading interpreter of George Bernard Shaw’s plays) speaks man-to-man with Sir John in Alfred Hitchcock’s Murder!

Enjoy the shows!

Handell Fane (Esme Percy) as a female circus acrobat in Alfred Hitchcock’s Murder!

Murder! 1930 U.K. (92 minutes) British International Pictures. Directed by Alfred Hitchcock; adapted by Hitchcock and Walter C. Mycroft from the novel “Enter Sir John” by Clemence Dane and Helen Simpson; scenario by Alma Reville; cinematography by Jack E. Cox; edited by John Mead; produced by John Maxwell.

A circus performer witnesses the final act of Alfred Hitchcock’s Murder!

(Hitchcock shot a German-language version of this film on the same set, with an Anglo-German cast starring Alfred Abel as Sir John Menier, Olga Tschechowa as Mary Baring, and Ekkehard Arendt as Handell Fane, released in 1931 as Mary (78 minutes.)