A woman is found murdered with another woman, Mary Baring, with whom she'd been heard to be arguing, present, in a daze. It seems like an open-and-shut case and Baring is put on trial for murder. During deliberations, 11 of the 12 members think she's guilty. The sceptical one is Sir John Menier who thinks there are holes in the case. However, he is talked round and Baring is found guilty. After the case Menier still has his doubts and wishes he'd been more forceful in arguing against a guilty verdict. He starts to do his own investigating.
In 1930 Alfred Hitchcock released Murder!, an intriguing murder-thriller. While Murder! Was being shot, Hitchcock was simultaneously making Mary, a German-language version of it, using the same sets but German actors. Mary is almost frame-for-frame and word-for-word (once translated!) the same as Murder! Though manages to run 19 minutes shorter. German must be a more succinct language than English...
The end result is almost as good as Murder! An original start, introducing much of the circumstances around the murder via a murder trial and introducing the main character, Menier, through the jury's deliberations.
The plot developments are good and the climax is quite Shakespearean, which is appropriate considering that the setting is the theatre and most of the characters are theatre actors and crew.
I watched the two films less than day apart and Murder! Was fresh in my mind when I watched Mary. Production values seem a bit lower on Mary and Hitchcock makes less use of clever camera angles in Mary. On the plus side, the irritating smash cuts in Murder! Are not there in Mary. Being longer, Murder! Seems more tension-filled too.
The subtitling on the version of Mary I watched was quite shonky, which also detracted from the film.
Now for the big question: why did Hitchcock make a German version of Murder!? I guess that sound in movies was so new and primitive that simply dubbing Murder! Into German wasn't an option. In the silent era a movie could easily be adapted into another language - just change the dialogue cards!
But why bother at all? My guess is that Germany was a large cinematic market and/or Hitchcock had a large fan base in Germany, hence a film specifically for that market. It's like (30 years later) the Beatles re-recording and releasing many of their early stuff in German.
It's worth noting that this was the one and only time Hitchcock made a foreign-language version of one of his movies. Either Mary wasn't as good an idea as he imagined or technology improved and soon after this his films were dubbed or sub-titled for foreign audiences.
