A Kind of Murder

A Kind of Murder is a 2015 film, about 95 minutes long, adapting a novel by Patricia Highsmith, The Blunderer (1954) to the screen.  The picture is beautifully shot with excellent and expressive pictorial compositions.  It's moody with snow falling out of grey east coast skies.  Figures stand apart from one another in grim empty lots between old buildings and there are dark alleyways and a labyrinth of subterranean vaults and chambers under Greenwich Village where the film's climax occurs.  Nightmarish-looking bridges, like pathways to oblivion, hang over the river or span rural ravines where corpses are sometimes found, shattered either by murder or suicide.  The movie is set in the early sixties, the decade when Rob and Laura Petrie lived in New Rochelle in the sit-com The Dick Van Dyke Show and the film's locations and set decoration are carefully designed to reflect this time and place -- New York's suburbs along trainlines leading into the city, crumbling neighborhoods in Hoboken or Newark, sleek modernist split-levels and brand-new ramblers surrounding the metropolis, old diners flanking busy highways piercing the ancient woods along the Hudson.  The scene-setting in A Kind of Murder is exemplary and one reason that the movie is half-worth watching.  

Walter Stackhouse is an unhappily married architect, sort of like a disgruntled Rob Petrie, handsome and self-reliant, an urban professional who works in an office in the city.  His wife is paranoid and accusatory and won't have sex with him.  (She is a realtor but doesn't seem to work too hard -- in any event, she's too ill to do much of anything.)  Stackhouse's wife attends to her mother who is dying in Saratoga Springs, a trip that requires her to take a bus ride through the suburbs into upstate New York.  (Incongruously, the bus departs from the splendid Union Terminal in Cincinnati -- a grandiose location used to simulate the bus station in the suburb where the protagonist's live.  I think this sort of location decision is intended to tap into Ohio State Film Commission funding.)  Stackhouse is a writer as well as a designer and he has published some short stories in Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine.  As research, Stackhouse has clipped out various newspaper accounts of murders and mayhem and keeps these source materials in a scrapbook in his den, a basement room reached by a elaborate ultra-modern (for 1960) spiral staircase.  This is one of the showy design features of the house in which Stackhouse lives, a place that he has planned and built himself.  A woman is found dead at the Rainbow Grill, a place where the bus running to Saratoga Springs stops.  Stackhouse takes interest in the unsolved crime and clips the news article about the murder.  From the outset, it's apparent that a morose, troll of a man who runs a used and rare bookstore in Newark is the perpetrator of this slaying.  The cops, led by a sadistic, baby-faced detective (he has glinting eyes and a cherub's features -- he looks like a character drawn by Chester Gould and appearing in a Dick Tracy comic) intuits that the bookseller is guilty and harasses him relentlessly to force his confession, although the villain resists.  Stackhouse embarks on an affair with a bohemian girl who sings in jazz club, a pit of darkness under street level, on MacDougal in Greenwich Village.  Of course, the hero wishes that his vindictive and crazy wife would die and has, perhaps, committed murder at least in his imagination.  When she travels again to Saratoga Springs on the cheerless night bus, the architect pursues her in his ridiculous little sports car and watches her get off the bus at the Rainbow Grill.  She doesn't get onto the bus again and, later, her battered corpse is found in a deep wooded ravine over which an old stone bridge stands -- the woman was either pitched over the precipice on the bridge or committed suicide.  Stackhouse finds himself suspected of murder, a situation that he makes worse by telling several easily unmasked lies about his whereabouts on the night of his wife's death.  On several occasions, Stackhouse has visited the bookseller, Mr. Kimmel, and tried to learn more about how he murdered his wife in the same location where he, apparently, plans to commit to kill his harridan of a wife.  The detective believes that Stackhouse has committed a "copy cat" killing and begins to persecute him.  Kimmel, who feels that Stackhouse's antics have exposed him to unwanted scrutiny, decides to kill the architect.  This latter point isn't motivated by anything but Highsmith's perversity and the ending of the movie doesn't make any objective sense -- although it has an emotional resonance that is consistent with the generally grim and paranoid features in the story.  Highsmith and film argue that everyone is guilty, that cops are vicious thugs, and, if you haven't committed murder in deed, you have, at least, done so in your wretched and culpable imagination.   There is at least a whiff of Strangers on a Train about the film, a sense that homicide and guilt are contagious, and that a random meeting can trigger all sorts of mayhem.  Your criminal intent is fungible with the criminal intent of just about everyone around you.  Highsmith presumes everyone is guilty.

The picture is well-acted, atmospheric, and very good until it's last 15 minutes when the thing goes off the rails.  By and large, the movie is a reasonably good and compelling neo-Noir.  The picture is directed by someone about which I know nothing (Andy Goddard) and stars Patrick Wilson as the bland, surbuban professional (he even looks like Dick Van Dyke) caught in this homicidal web; Eddie Marsan is menacing as Kimmel, the nondescript used bookdealer and murderer.