Blackmail [PG]

When Alice White and her boyfriend, Frank, from New Scotland Yard quarrel over dinner one night, she accompanies an attractive and charming gentleman artist to his studio where the fun seems innocent enough but then turns nasty when he tries to rape her and she ends up killing him in self defence. As one of the detectives on the case, Frank soon becomes aware of what has happened, but the situation takes an even more serious turn when a sinister man who also knows what Alice has done, begins to blackmail her. 

Even in the very early stages of his career, Alfred Hitchcock was daring and innovative, a trait that is proven to be fraught with success in his first talkie movie, Blackmail, made in 1929. 

When Alice White and her boyfriend, Frank, from New Scotland Yard quarrel over dinner one night, she accompanies an attractive and charming gentleman artist to his studio where the fun seems innocent enough but then turns nasty when he tries to rape her and she ends up killing him in self defence. As one of the detectives on the case, Frank soon becomes aware of what has happened, but the situation takes an even more serious turn when a sinister man who also knows what Alice has done, begins to blackmail her. 

It proves to be rather difficult to write about these more dated and vintage films for the simple reason that they are dated by modern standards; I’m from a modern audience, and, if it wasn’t for The Book, I would have no behind-the-scenes or historic information to share. Reading the film’s article in The Book, I have discovered that this was Britain’s first all-talkie film and who better to do that than Hitchcock? Even in the early stages of his career, he was daring and innovative, and this movie proves it. 

The dubbing is something that’s worth a mention because the woman who plays Alice is actually Czech with her English not up to scratch. This movie was a real experiment in dubbing because Hitchcock has Joan Barry off-camera reading the lines while Ondra who plays Alice, mouths them. There are also various scenes where dubbing is used to a more sinister effect: having voices piled on top of one another so that they became nonsensical babble and then having the clear and stabbing word” knife” repeated to convey the mindset of the heroine/villainess. This was something that had never been done before. For these firsts alone, the film is special and of historic importance to cinema. 

Starring Anny Ondra, Sara Allgood, Charles Paton, John Longden, Donald Calthrop, Cyril Ritchard, Hannah Jones, Harvey Braban, and ex-detective Sergeant Bishop, Blackmail is a black and white classic of historic importance that’s filled with drama, murder, suspense, and black comedy. A bit hard to keep up with sometimes, as it begins as a silent movie, nevertheless, it’s a good film.