Dear Murderer
Decline of the English Murder?
Directed by Arthur Crabtree
United Kingdom, 1947
In 1946 George Orwell, the author of Animal Farm and 1984, published an essay titled The Decline of the English Murder. He describes a typical Sunday afternoon in an English home where a man settles down after lunch, while his wife is asleep in the armchair, to open his newspaper ‘The News of the World’. What is it he wants to read about? Naturally, a murder.
Orwell then goes on to talk about a Golden Age of English murders where the killers were usually respectable people – often middle class, the motives were related to sex or infidelity, and the method almost universally poisoning. He contrasts these cases with murders of the modern day: crimes involving casual acquaintances, that are particularly violent, and take place in the anonymous setting of the bed-sit or dance hall. Orwell wonders what would have caused this change: the brutalizing effect of two world wars, or perhaps as some had suggested the coarsening effect of the ‘Americanization’ of British culture?
Orwell’s title was clearly ironic: murder was not declining in numbers but from his perspective the art of murder was… He worked for a stint as a film reviewer in the early 1940s but had given this up before this week’s film Dear Murderer was released in 1947.
Billed as a British film noir it is an exemplar of the perfect English murder. Ask any cinema goer about film noir and your responses will usually include something about a hard-boiled gangster or private detective, a tough-talking femme fatale, chancers living on the edge, and a nihilistic survey of society’s underbelly. There is no tough talking in Dear Murderer. What we do have are velvet smoking jackets, silk scarves, breakfast with a silver service and a script delivered with a cut-glass accent.
An English businessman with a surprisingly (for the 1940s) American name, Lee Warren (played by Eric Portman) has to travel from London to New York for eight months as his company is breaking new ground. Things are on the up. However, he has to leave his glamorous wife Vivien behind, and Lee is a jealous man. Justifiably so you would agree, as she has a wandering eye and has cheated on him before.  But leave her behind he does and before long her regular letters stop arriving. Is he being paranoid? Well yes and no. He returns home unannounced, confirms his suspicions and then plots the perfect revenge. He will murder Vivien’s lover in such a way that no one would suspect foul play. And only she will know the truth because he will tell her himself.
We won’t give away the details here – to do so would be to really spoil the film (available free to view on YouTube and BFI Player) but the first dramatic scene involves Warren describing the plan in detail to his victim, Richard Fenton, played by Oscar Wilde double Dennis Price. Fenton happens to be a barrister and Warren wants to ensure that his plan is bulletproof. No actual bullets involved of course – we are in the hallowed London Inns of Court after all.
A murderer usually has to act alone. He can trust no one, but with my method I have you to help me. Weighing and considering every detail. And if you can't find a mistake, then I have the comfort of knowing that my plan has been approved by an astute lawyer.
We have the usual array of stock characters on display but the clipped pronunciation of every word and the excessive etiquette – every character’s entrance is greeted with the offer of a cigarette from a case – only serves to sharpen the film’s cruel edge.
It does seem as though the whole cast is scheming, with the two exceptions of Vivien’s nice-but-dim Atlas of a new boyfriend, Jimmy Martin, and the evidently ‘knows a lot more than she lets on’ housemaid Rita. As the plot unwinds you may be thinking that the sociopathic married couple deserve one another but Vivien really takes it up a notch as the bad, but beautiful, siren. When she hears from her husband how Fenton died for her she looks directly at us the audience, breaking the fourth wall and smiles with an exquisite look of malice. But you know, the wages of sin and all that … and this film has more twists than a corkscrew.
There are some great moments placing the film in its historical context: waiting a whole weekend to place a transatlantic telephone call; Warren, in New York, spots his wife on the arm of another man in the society magazine  Tatler, a prototype for Facebook. Dear Murderer was originally a stage play and there is a hermetic atmosphere that adds to the claustrophobic sense of foreboding as the events play out. The performances are all – as the characters themselves would say ‘first-rate’, including the stolid Inspector Pembury (Jack Warner) who would give Hercules Poirot a run for his money. However, Norwegian actress Greta Gynt really does standout as Vivien.
Insp Pembury: All I do know is that whoever planned this murder was a clever man.
Sgt Fox: Cool, calculating, ruthless. Clever
Insp Pembury: Does that sound like Jimmy Martin to you?
Sgt Fox: You can never tell with those quiet ones. He may have committed half a dozen other crimes for all we know.
Insp. Pembury: That's right. Perhaps he's Hitler in disguise. He's about the right height.
Directed by Arthur Crabtree, the screenplay was co-written by the writer-director Muriel Box and her husband, Sydney, studio head at Gainsborough Pictures. And the producer? Betty Box, Muriel’s sister.
Keep it in the family … Muriel (L), Sydney and Betty (R)
So there are no shootouts, heists, or smoke-filled bars in Dear Murderer. But if we return to the original French definition of noir cinema, we are looking for a film that is ‘oneiric, strange, erotic, ambivalent and cruel’. Dear Murderer has all of those elements in spades. George Orwell would surely have approved.  Â
Reids’ Results (out of 100)
C: 63
T: 67
N: 67
S: 71
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