Blackmail

Blackmail (1929) 

Notable cast/crew: Anny Ondra as Alice White appears in her second consecutive Hitchcock film.  John Longden as Detective Frank Webber makes the first of four credited Hitchcock films.  Hannah Jones as The Landlady appears in the third of five Hitchcock films.   Sara Allgood as Mrs White.  She'll appear in Hitchcock's next film, Juno and the Paycock.  Donald Calthrop as Tracy in the first of four Hitchcock films.

Running time: 85 minutes

Director: Alfred Hitchcock

Plot: The opening scene shows an arrest and establishes Frank as working for Scotland Yard. We're then introduced to his girlfriend, Alice.  At dinner, they have an argument she provokes, and Frank storms out.  She then meets with a local artist who arranged to see her that evening.  At the end of the evening they go to his studio. She paints a silly face on a blank canvas and signs her name to it.  She decides to model for him.  He forces himself on her, and drags her into a canopied bed.  As she yells in protest, her hand emerges from the drapes and finds a knife on the night stand next to a loaf of bread.  Her arm disappears, there is more struggling, and then his arm falls out from behind the drapes.  

No means no

She emerges from the dropes in shock, robotically moving, still clutching the knife.  She then comes to her senses, gets dressed, and tries to remove any sign of her having been there.  She tears a whole in a painting of a leering jester in the process.  She paints over her name on the sketch she made earlier and leaves the knife.  Her exit is down a long, spiral flight of stairs.  Unbeknownst to her, she has left her gloves.  Frank discovers a glove but hides it when he recognizes the artist as the man Alice left with that night.  Alice arrives home at daybreak and pretends to have been at home in bed all night.

Alice, wracked with guilt, begins to hear KNIFE over and over.  Frank arrives to see Alice and shows her the glove.  At the same time a bum shows up who had been hanging around the artist's residence.  He not only knows Frank has the glove, but he produces the other glove from the pair.  He had stolen it from the scene before the police got there.  He proceeds to finagle money out of Frank to buy his silence.

Things are complicated by a note the landlady had taken for the artist with a message from the bum.  The bum had been trying to swindle money from the artist for some time, and now he's wanted for questioning in the murder.  Frank makes the bum sweat by locking the room and telling him he's called for the police.  It's their word against his, and the bum has a criminal record.  When the police arrive, he panics and jumps through the window, fleeing to the British Museum.  A rooftop chase ensues, and the bum falls through the glass panes to his death.  Annie arrives at Scotland Yard to turn herself in but finds they already consider the case closed with the bum's death.  She confesses to Frank, and he admits he already knew.  It being a case of self-defense, Frank leads her out of the office preventing anyone else from ever knowing the truth.  The movie closes with the jester painting being carried by Annie, her face falling as the police around her laugh at a joke.

MacGuffin: The glove

Hitchcock cameo: Hitchcock on the Underground having a fight with a small boy

Hitchcock themes:

• Love triangle
• Blondes
• Stairs
• Transference of guilt

Verdict: This film ushers Hitchcock into the Sound Age, but it is also considered the first British "all-talkie" feature film.  It began production as a silent film, and there is actually a shorter silent version of the film.  Hitchcock changed some shots and added some completely new shots to make the sound version.  The opening eight minutes of the film is silent except for music and some minor foley work to fill in some background noises.  Stylistically and literally, this film is a bridge between the two eras.  One complication of the switch was that lead actress Anny Ondra presented a problem.  Her heavy Czech accent was considered unintelligible or unbelievable in playing an English shop girl.  Hitchcock was good friends with Ondra and didn't want to replace her.  They got around this by having Ondra mouth her lines while Joan Barry read them from just off camera.  While not technically an overdub, it is the first known instance of one actress' voice being used for another's.  There does still exist an early sound test for Blackmail with Hitchcock and Ondra speaking briefly.  I don't find her accent that distracting, but it is a short clip so it may be that it was more noticeable in longer scenes.  At worst, they were playing it safe so that the first sound film didn't get a negative reaction.


Hitchcock incorporates more fancy camera work: catching the detectives' reflection off a mirror, a sidelong shot of a staircase that rises up the profile of the stairs as the artist and Alice ascend the stairs, the overhead shot looking down the depth of the staircase as Alice descends the stairs.  Some of the museum shots in particular were done using the Schufftan process due to poor lighting in the museum.  This involved taking a still shot of the museum and reflecting it off of a mirror that had part of its surface scratched off.  This allowed the shot to be filmed off the reflection with with actors entering through a "door" in the scratched off area.  It's not dissimilar to how later matte work would be done.  There is a striking scene where the artist has the shadow of a chandelier cast on his face, and the shadow appears to form a curled moustache.  Hitchcock said this was an explicit homage to the moustache-twirling villain of the Silent Era, a sort of nod goodbye to those films.  He also plays with imagery and sound together as he goes from a shot of a panhandler's extended arm frightening Alice into a scream blending into the landlady screaming as she finds the artist's dead body, arm extended in the same way.  The amplification of the word KNIFE as Alice sits at breakfast also plays with sound to heighten the anxiety we feel for and through Alice.

After a string of movies bouncing around different styles, and even moreso than The Lodger, this feels to me like a real Hitchcock film.  It is this style that he develops in the main body of his work, and many of the themes here will be explored further in later films.  This holds up well because the plot could be done in any era and not lose any of the tension.

Out of five bananas, I give it:

Next review: Juno and the Paycock