The Inner History of the Diana Baring Case In Hitchcock’s “Murder!”

PLACEHOLDER INTRO
Structured as a whodunnit, Alfred Hitchcock’s Murder! (1930) is a rarity in the director’s body of work. Hitchcock typically dealt in a form of suspense that depends on the audience knowing exactly who the murderer is. But here, even the prime suspect—an actress, Diana Baring (Norah Baring)—can’t say for sure whether she’s guilty or innocent. As the crime’s sole witness (or perhaps its perpetrator), she blacked out at the crucial moment.

To clear her name, one of the jurors at her trial—another actor, the celebrated Sir John (Herbert Marshall)—sets out to apply “the technique of [his] art to real life” in order to uncover “the inner history of the Baring case.” Comically, each time he attempts to explain these rather grandiose declarations, he is interrupted by some mundane intrusion, but I gather that he initially hopes to establish Diana’s innocence using the actorly tools of character and psychological study. On that front, though, he makes little headway. Hitchcock reserves those insights for the audience.

In one of the most complex scenes in his entire body of work, we follow Diana into the privacy of her prison cell and enter into the theater of her mind to peer into the shadowy backstage of memory where the truth lies hidden. There, beyond conscious reach, reside the very memories that clear her name and identify the real murderer.