I'm going to go ahead and post this one tonight because I'll be on the road back to Maryland all day tomorrow. Remember when I was doing all my Hitchcock movies and I told you guys that my mom is a huge fan? (I actually don't remember if I said that or not and I'm far too lazy to go back and look it up.) She's a huge fan. So I asked her last night to suggest something for me to watch and she picked Murder!
It's about an actress named Diana Baring (Norah Baring) who is convicted of killing a rival actress and sentenced to hang. She doesn't remember anything about the incident, but the evidence was overwhelming and a jury of her peers found her guilty. Except that after the sentencing, one of the jurors, Sir John (Herbert Marshall) starts to think that maybe she was innocent. So he recruits the stage manager of Diana's former troupe (Edward Chapman) to help him investigate.
This is another of those police-bungle-everything-so-only-amateurs-solve-cases type of "mystery" movies. For one thing, Sir John is portrayed as having known the defendant, which would bar him from being on a jury. This is apparently a departure the movie makes from the book, which simply had him as an observer at her trial. There are other little things as well that make the movie seem more smug than suspenseful.
Overall, I would say that it is very much a relic of its time and not nearly as classic as some of Hitchcock's other films.
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