1954: Dial M For Murder
Technology’s biggest hang-up? The watch stopping. Not to worry, there’s an app for that. And Siri. Also, who has a phone cord lying around these days? Wireless phones are clearly this movie’s biggest killer. Stupid phones.
1954: Rear Window
After photographer L.B. Jefferies breaks a leg and is stuck in his apartment during a sweltering summer, he takes to playing voyeur through his neighbor’s open windows and spots a murder. How does technology negatively affect this peeping tom? Affordable air conditioning units would allow the denizens to escape the gaze of this homebody who might end up spending his days on Reddit, Tumblr, or StumbleUpon instead. Maybe Jeffries would stream the movie Disturbia, or illegally download it through a torrent, instead.
There’s a scene in “A Perfect Murder,” the Dial-M remake, where Gwyneth Paltrow is in the tub, but is drawn to the kitchen by a ringing phone. The phonecall is part of the plan to get her in place to be attacked and killed.
And it plays out rather absurdly onscreen, because not only does it require the viewer to accept that the penthouse-dwelling Paltrow has ONLY ONE TELEPHONE, and it’s in the kitchen, but that she also has no answering machine, thus allowing it to ring a few dozen times while she gets out of the bath and walks to the kitchen to answer the still-ringing phone.
And since this is the very scene of the supposed ‘Perfect Murder’ as promised by the title, it’s not exactly a minor plot hole.