Although it shares DNA with both Rope and Strangers on a Train, Dial M for Murder is something of an outlier in Alfred Hitchcock’s career because the film denies viewers some key intel and places unusual emphasis on its O. Henry-style ending. Tony (Ray Milland) sets Dial M for Murder’s increasingly byzantine plot in motion when he blackmails a shady college mate (Anthony Dawson) into murdering his wife, Margot (Grace Kelly). The caddish Tony’s motives mix greed and jealousy – Margot’s had a dalliance with visiting mystery writer Mark (Robert Cummings) – but he primarily takes self-satisfied pleasure in engineering the perfect murder. Flaws in the plan inevitably manifest, however, forcing Tony into an improvised scramble to hide his culpability. Adapted from his own play by Frederick Knott, Dial M for Murder betrays its stage origins by largely staying confined to Tony and Margot’s London apartment, but Hitchcock offsets this deficit by making discreet but effective use of 3D, which had a fleeting popularity in the mid-1950s as a means of attracting a TV-besotted audience back to the theaters. A Hitchcock favorite, Kelly makes the first of her three appearances in the director’s work – she also co-stars in the second of his 1954 films, Rear Window – but top acting honors go to the two veterans of the stage production: Dawson as the would-be killer and the delightful John Williams as an uncharacteristically competent (for cop-averse Hitchcock) police inspector. The screening offers a rare opportunity to see the film as intended – in 3D.