New Play in Manhattan

Dial "M" for Murder (by Frederick Knott) is that always welcome visitor, an unusually satisfying thriller. Playwright Knott is not only more ingenious than most members of the current Spine Trust, but being British is more urbane as well. Maurice Evans has abandoned battlements and blank verse to play a dinner-jacketed modern villain, while John Williams, as a Scotland Yard inspector, sees justice done with engaging suavity.

There is no mystery to Dial "M". Maurice Evans has married for money, and in his eagerness to collect it, decides to do away with his wife (Gusti Huber). He devises a neat plan and hires a sound fellow to carry it out while he himself is ostentatiously elsewhere. The murder goes off on schedule--except that it's the wife who, with a handy pair of scissors, dispatches the killer. This being only the middle of Act II, a lot more has to happen, and it is the measure of Playwright Knott's resourcefulness that villainy does not slump, nor chicanery deteriorate, nor sleuthing go to seed.

Dial "M" is not world-shaking. Its first and last ten minutes are a little wordy and more than a little slow, and many murder yarns have displayed more striking situations or original twists or hair-raising climaxes. But few recent ones have been so consistently competent. In terms of plot twists & turns, Mr. Knott always refills the audience's glass before it is quite empty; and in view of the danger of leaving fingerprints, his touch is consistently light. He clearly realizes that the author of a successful murder yarn has to think of almost as many things as the author of a successful murder.

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