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RT Obscura, the exclusive column by renowned critic Kim Newman, sees the writer plumbing the depths of the RT archive in search of some forgotten gems. In his tenth column, Kim unearths a rarely seen Hitchcock movie from the early days of the talkies.

Made in 1930, Alfred Hitchcock's second sound thriller isn't seen as a cornerstone work like his first, Blackmail (or the silent The Lodger); indeed, Murder! hasn't been widely seen at all in recent years. I suspect a single dated aspect has kept it off television schedules for a few decades: the self-hating murderer's motive is to prevent a malicious gossip from telling another woman that he's a half-caste ("ah-ha, he has black blood", elucidates an amateur detective ominously when this comes out). As it turns out, mixed race would seem to be the least remarkable thing about him (and the girl knows anyway). Handel Fane (Esme Percy), a drag trapeze artiste given to fits of homicidal fury, is coded as screamingly gay but is supposed to be obsessively in love with heroine Diana Baring (Nora Baring) -- though he still keeps quiet when she's condemned to hang for the crime he committed.



Ostensibly, it's a mystery story. Sir John Menier (Herbert Marshall), a theatrical knight doing his jury service at Diana's trial, is pressured by the rest of the jury to convict the accused (whom he knows slightly, which he really ought to have declared pre-trial). Unsatisfied with the verdict and naturally falling in love with the girl in the condemned cell, Sir John becomes a sleuth, taking detective hints from the Mouse Trap scenes in Hamlet (!), and sets about snaring Fane, the only suspect who is given any character. Hitchcock always professed to be impatient with whodunits and skips through the mystery angle (ie: no superfluous suspects or red herrings) to get to the technical challenges and peculiar perverse quirks which interest him.

In many ways, it's an advance from Blackmail in its innovative use of the then-new sound medium and certain sequences are as striking and strange as the justly-famous 'knife' routine in the earlier film. We open with a long pan across a row of windows, with heads poked out as the title cry goes up, and sundry busybodies craning to get on the scene of the crime (typical Hitch is the shapely silhouette of a woman undressing) as an aural montage one-ups the purely visual business which introduces The Lodger.



In the jury room, we get more Hitchcockian satire of the small-minded ditherers and resentful time-servers in the room -- a middle-aged man who initially votes to acquit because he fancies the accused and a daffy spinster who veers from believing the girl innocent on the grounds that she was in a fugue state when she killed to writing her off as a homicidal maniac -- then becomes bizarrely stylised as Sir John, introduced dead last as the sole Twelve Angry Men-style hold-out, presents arguments only to be battered by a literal chorus chanting 'what's your answer to that, Sir John?' in unison as they pose oppressively around him. Then, we hear the verdict and sentence off-screen as the camera stays in the jury room while a functionary ignores the momentous matters and tidies away the teacups and papers left behind after the debate.