Starring Anny Ondra, John Longden and Sara Allgood
Produced by British International Pictures
Detective Frank Webber is taking his girl Alice out for a night on the town. Frank manages to sneak the couple into a posh and exclusive night spot, but Alice seems distracted. He asks if she'd like to take in a movie later. She demurs before accepting.
Then a man in a light-colored suit enters the restaurant. Alice notices him and backs out of her date with Frank. Frustrated, the detective storms out of the restaurant, but pauses outside the entrance to contemplate his next move. He seems ready to reenter the building. When he sees Alice leaving arm-in-arm with the other man.
The man, an artist named Crewe, walks her home, pointing out his flat as they go. He asks if she'd like to stop up and after a little protesting Alice agrees.
Once in the man's apartment her eye is drawn to a painting of a clown pointing his finger out from the canvas and laughing. Crewe gives Alice an impromptu art lesson, drawing a slender woman's figure on a cartoonish face she created. He offers to draw her modeling a dress he has on hand. She slips into it while he plays the piano. When she's dressed... he forces her onto the bed.
Alice screams and fights back, but it's no use. Desperately, she reaches for anything she can find. Her hand falls on a knife next to a plate of cheese. There is a struggle hidden behind a curtain. When the confrontation ends, a dazed Alice emerges from behind the curtain.
Panicking, she quickly wipes all evidence of her presence from the room, walks home and slips into bed before anyone notices she is gone.
The next day, Crewe's landlady finds his body and calls the police. One of the officers is Frank. He surveys the room and notices Alice's glove on the floor. Instead of turning over the evidence, he pockets it and goes to speak with his girl.
As Frank starts to confront Alice about her night, the couple are interrupted by petty criminal Tracey, who has Alice's other glove from the murder scene. He's willing to forget they were there for a payoff.
Can Frank and Alice turn the tables on Tracey? And can Alice live with her crime?
Amidst all that is going on in film at this point (stilted melodramas and a messy transition to sound), it is fascinating to see Hitchcock's first real talkie arrive. And it's a classic Hitchcock set up. Boy like girl. Girl likes other boy. Girl kills other boy after attempted rape. Boy helps girl cover up crime. Stir in a healthy dose of paranoia and you are ready.
What surprises is Hitchcock's immediate mastery of sound and all of its possibilities in film. There is an amazing sequence with Alice, at the height of her paranoia, listening to another person describe the crime. It's a normal conversation, but gradually the words start to blur and become muffled until all Alice can hear is the word "knife." And the word is shouted like punctuation at the end of a sentence.
More than that (and very unlike the recently reviewed In Old Arizona), Blackmail is a film that revels in its silent moments. The director already seems to grasp the tension created when we hear nothing, when we are holding our breath in anticipation along with the characters on screen.
The other truly notable element of Blackmail is its imaginative camerawork. The camera floats through walls and floors to follow characters up flights of stairs. It finds the small details of every scene: here, a spinning hubcap; there, the tinkling bell above the shop door. We see the characters in extreme closeup, often seeming to challenge the audience directly.
All that said, it's far from a perfect film. The editing, a signature of later Hitchcock work, is too disjointed and choppy in parts. We careen from shot to shot, sometimes with little purpose and sometimes for too short a moment for it to have purpose.
The acting is okay, with the exception of Anny Ondra's Alice. She overplays every emotion in a movie that needs a bit of understatement.
Knowing where Hitchcock is going later in his career only adds to my admiration for Blackmail. Like the pencil drawing in the film, we get hints of genius, but it's unfinished and unrealized here. Still, it's a fascinating watch if only to see the word "Hitchcockian" begin to be defined.
***1/2 out of *****
Photo from The RD Horror Project
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