Review by
Eric Hillis
Directed by: Alfred Hitchcock
Starring: Anny Ondra, John Longden, Sara Allgood, Donald Calthrop, Cyril Ritchard, Charles
Paton, Hannah Jones, Harvey Braban, Percy Parsons, Phyllis Monkman
Hitchcock: The Beginning is a new
11-disc bluray boxset from Studiocanal featuring 10 of Alfred Hitchcock's early films and a new documentary, Becoming Hitchcock, which explores the legacy of Hitchcock's first sound film,
1929's Blackmail.
In the sixth part of our 11-part review of the boxset, we look at Blackmail.
By 1929 Alfred Hitchcock had fully mastered the art of silent
cinema, and with Blackmail he was presented with the
challenge of transferring his talents to the new "talkie" format without
trading his flair for visual storytelling. Like many of the early talkies,
Blackmail was adapted from a play (by
Charles Bennett), but Hitchcock refused to simply "film the play,"
instead opening the story out across multiple London locations and adding
the sort of suspense sequences with which his name is now
synonymous.
Hitchcock actually began filming Blackmail as a silent.
However, he had a hunch that he might be asked to deliver a talkie
version, and so he purposely staged several scenes in a manner that would
allow for dialogue to later be added by obscuring the mouths of his
characters. Much of the silent version (which is included in Studiocanal's
boxset) is present in the talkie version, so Blackmail is
technically a "semi-talkie." But Hitchcock would likely have filmed these
sequences sans dialogue regardless, such as the opening six-minute
sequence that details police detective Frank (John Longden)
arresting and charging a suspect, and the climactic chase through the
British Museum.
Anny Ondra, who had played the female lead in Hitchcock's final
silent
The Manxman, was cast in the lead role of Frank's girlfriend Alice, but her Czech
accent meant her mouthed lines were recorded by actress Joan Barry,
standing offscreen. Alice is secretly seeing the bohemian Crewe (Cyril Ritchard) behind Frank's back, and she ends up in his apartment one night after a
row with Frank. When Crewe attempts to sexually assault Alice, she reaches
for a knife and plunges it into his groin. The murder happens offscreen
behind a bustling curtain, but in a subsequent scene Hitchcock has the
dazed Alice walk through central London. There she gazes at an animated
neon billboard which morphs into a knife thrusting towards the first four
letters of the word "cocktail," leaving us in no doubt as to how Crewe met
his grisly end.
Wouldn't you know it, Frank finds himself assigned to the case. When he
discovers a glove at the scene he recognises it as belonging to Alice.
Frank sets out to protect his lover, but he and Alice are forced to
contend with Tracy (Donald Calthrop), a conniving criminal who saw
Alice leave Crewe's flat and wants a payoff to keep quiet.
While many directors struggled with the transition from silents to
talkies, Hitchcock embraced the opportunities it provided. In his first
talkie, Hitchcock immediately begins experimenting with sound, most
notably in a breakfast scene where he muddies the dialogue of a gossiping
neighbour to highlight the repeated word "knife." At the same breakfast
table the scraping of Tracy's knife on his plate similarly unnerves the
distraught Alice. Ironically, it's the opportunity for silence offered by
the talkies that Hitchcock takes most advantage of here. Due to their
incessant piano accompaniment, the silents never quite lived up to their
name, but here Hitchcock is able to drop the sound completely at key
moments, such as Alice's dazed reaction to taking Crewe's life. For an
audience in 1929, long accustomed to the tinkling of ivories throughout a
film, this scene must have been positively unnerving, and the lack of
sound is still unsettling today. Ondra's performance is this scene is
fantastic, which makes it all the more of a shame that her dialogue scenes
are dogged by crude lip-synching.
The not always smooth mix of silent and talkie techniques sometimes leaves
Blackmail a little creaky. There's no doubt the end result
would have been a lot more polished if Hitchcock had initially set out to
make a talkie rather than rejigging a silent halfway through production.
But in its mix of two storytelling forms, Blackmail provides
a fascinating look at how a top director negotiated what might have been a
disastrous transition. Hitchcock had previously made a thriller with
1927's The Lodger, but Blackmail is really the first example of what we now
recognise as a Hitchcock movie. In Ondra's Alice we have the first of his
iconic blonde heroines and one of his classic morally flawed protagonists.
The film's obsession with the knife as murder weapon hints at more
explicit killings to come in his filmography. And the British Museum
climax is the first of his set-pieces at iconic locations, to be followed
by the likes of the Statue of Liberty, the Royal Albert Hall and Mount
Rushmore. Blackmail sees Hitchcock combine sound and image
to create a thrilling experience for the first, but by no means the last
time in his unrivalled career.
Blackmail is part of Studiocanal's 'Hitchcock: The
Beginning' bluray boxset, available now.