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FILM REVIEWS

The regal Gwyneth Paltrow slips effortlessly into the glass slippers of Grace Kelly in A Perfect Murder, a film based on Alfred Hitchcock's film of the play Dial M For Murder.

This updating of a tale of adultery and murder, more inspired by the original than a remake of it, makes great use of Paltrow's ability to wear both vulnerability and flinty intelligence on her willowy frame.

Paltrow portrays Emily Taylor, a Manhattan socialite who reluctantly wears that label. She has a facility with languages, which she uses in her job at the United Nations. But her other job is being the trophy wife of Wall Street baron Steven (Michael Douglas). And that's a job she's not handling well.

Emily is cheating. Her paramour is a roguish artist named David Shaw (Viggo Mortensen). And Steven has figured this out. Because his financial world is collapsing along with his marriage, he decides to avail himself of his wife's fortune. And to solve all his problems at once, he resolves to have her killed.

Unlike the original Dial M for Murder, which had the jealous and soon-to-be-impoverished husband blackmailing an old schoolmate, A Perfect Murder has the cuckolded man confront his chief tormentor. Steven faces David, and in the best Wall Street shark tradition, intimidates David into agreeing to murder Emily. The little chat between David and Steven is so ripe with menace that it is the film's best scene.

That's only the first clever twist in a movie that is full of them. Crucial to the plan is a distracting phone call that Steven will make while the killer sneaks up on his wife in their Upper East Side townhouse. And it isn't giving too much away to say that things don't turn out as anyone plans in this nervy, moody thriller.

Douglas and Paltrow are quite good at suggesting a failing marriage with a history, without actually talking about it. Paltrow suggests guilt and remorse in every word, and Douglas is quite good at giving even the most banal marital chitchat an accusatory edge. Mortensen is naturally sexy, appealing and, at the same time, creepy.

And a nice touch is the casting of David Suchet (TV's Hercule Poirot) as an Arabic New York police detective who glowers through an investigation of the case.

Director Andrew Davis (Under Siege, The Fugitive) ably handles what to him must have seemed like a chamber-music piece, building suspense, horror and fear, hiding just who it is we're supposed to sympathize with.

The version I saw of it was a pretty good movie, up until the ending, which was too conventional for my tastes. But the studio and the director were still monkeying around with that ending at press time, so consider this review provisional. If the perfunctory ending I saw last month is the one that the film ends up with, it's a 2 1/2-star movie. If they fix the ending and use the foreshadowing in the film, three stars.

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