Robert Cummings makes good company of men who are trying their best and not always managing it. We rate his light comic assurance, but Hitchcock gives his ordinary-man appeal a more demanding use.
Fi1m perspective
In Dial M for Murder (1954), Robert Cummings’s Mark Halliday helps keep a confined thriller’s long conversations worth listening to. Ray Milland’s persuasive schemer is the obvious attraction, with Cummings in a key supporting role alongside him and Grace Kelly. Cummings brings an agreeable presence to company we do not entirely trust. We like that quality in him: a thriller need not have every actor competing to look dangerous.
That ease had a home in the light comedies that made him a leading man by the late 1930s and early 1940s. He was often cast as a well-meaning young man whose efforts did not quite go to plan; the bumbling mattered as much as the charm. The Devil and Miss Jones (1941), opposite Jean Arthur, is a useful example of that comic work. Saboteur (1942) put him into Hitchcock’s suspense as Barry Kane, an innocent man on the run, giving an audience a more urgent reason to want things to go right for him.
We were thoroughly entertained by Dial M for Murder, because the actors keep the long exchanges engaging even when Hitchcock has a great deal to explain. Some passages are stiff, and Cummings shares the task of making exposition bearable rather than having the film arranged around his strengths. There is less opportunity here for the bumbling that served his comedies, and he fits into the ensemble without it. We recommend the film for its precise, nasty suspense and its actors, with Milland foremost; Cummings is part of why the long conversations work.
His dramatic television work included Twelve Angry Men (1954), before The Bob Cummings Show (1955–59) gave his comedy a sustained home. As bachelor photographer Bob Collins, he became a television star, and the subsequent association with comedy is easy enough to understand. It is also a poor reason to neglect the suspense films. After Dial M for Murder, try Saboteur to see what Hitchcock does with him in the lead.
Biography
Robert Cummings (born Charles Clarence Robert Orville Cummings, also credited as Bob Cummings, Blade Stanhope Conway and Bruce Hutchens) was an American actor. He was born on 9 June 1910 in Joplin, Missouri, and died on 2 December 1990. He trained at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts and began his career on Broadway and in films in the 1930s, initially using assumed identities including an English stage name.
Cummings appeared in more than 100 films. He is known for roles in the Alfred Hitchcock thrillers Saboteur (1942) and Dial M for Murder (1954), in which he played Mark Halliday. Other film credits include The Devil and Miss Jones (1941), King's Row (1942) and What a Way to Go! (1964).
On television he starred in The Bob Cummings Show (1955–59) and made guest appearances including in The Twilight Zone and Bewitched. He received five Primetime Emmy Award nominations and won the award for Best Actor in a Single Performance in 1955. In 1960 he was awarded two stars on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.
