Murder!

Abstract

Among the allegories of authorship suffusing Hitchcock’s cinema, Murder! constitutes the earliest and singularly idealist meditation on the director. Fashioning a landscape in which drama, illicit entanglements, and cultural institutionalization explicitly merge, the 1930 film stages a murder mystery that begins in the domain of a theater company and proceeds through public and private performances to a proscenium-framed conclusion. The plot is driven by a well-known dramatist-manager who appears in his own productions, a figure who comprehends his position and executes his vision in the broadest contexts and most intimate terms. This individual, Sir John Menier, pursues, scripts, and theatricalizes a crime case as an intensely personal undertaking that extends beyond a crowd-pleasing spectacle to deeply fulfilling and socially ameliorative art.