Becoming Hitchcock: The Legacy of "Blackmail" (StudioCanal Films, Nedland Media, Turner Classic Movies, 2024)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2025 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Wednesday, January 15) Turner Classic Movies aired a 2024 documentary called Becoming Hitchcock: The Legacy of Blackmail, followed by Alfred Hitchcock’s 1929 Blackmail itself. Blackmail began as a 1928 play by Charles Bennett, who was given rather short shrift in the documentary (as he’s been in most Hitchcock biographies) even though he worked on six of Hitchcock’s films (the 1934 The Man Who Knew Too Much, The 39 Steps, Secret Agent, Sabotage and Young and Innocent in Britain and Foreign Correspondent in the U.S.) and was essentially to Hitchcock what Dudley Nichols was to John Ford or Robert Riskin to Frank Capra. Bennett and Riskin had one intriguing thing in common: they both first connected with their superstar directors when the filmmaker made a movie based on one of their plays (Riskin’s first interface with Capra was when Capra filmed one of Riskin’s plays, Bless You, Sister, retitling it The Miracle Woman) a few years before they actually worked together. Blackmail the play premiered at the Globe Theatre on the West End of London on February 28, 1928 as a vehicle for American actress Tallulah Bankhead (who would later star in Hitchcock’s Lifeboat in 1944). Directed by Raymond Massey (who was far better known as an actor), it ran for only 39 performances and was Bankhead’s biggest London flop. But British International Pictures bought the movie rights and assigned it to their top director, Alfred Hitchcock, whom they’d lured from Michael Balcon’s Gainsborough Pictures a year before. Hitchcock shot Blackmail as a silent film and then the talkie revolution arrived in Britain two years after it had started in America. Becoming Hitchcock’s writer-director, Laurent Bouzereau, did some interesting split-screen juxtapositions between the silent and sound versions, notably in the key scene in which heroine Alice White (Anny Ondra, voiced in the sound version by Joan Barry for reasons which shall be explained later), after a quarrel with her police-detective boyfriend Frank Webber (John Longdon), goes off with another man, a painter named Crewe (Cyril Ritchard), fights off his attempted seduction and ultimately stabs him with a bread knife, killing him in self-defense.

Bouzereau’s main argument in Becoming Hitchcock is that a lot of the scenes in Hitchcock’s later and far better known films originated in Blackmail, including a hero-heroine-villain love triangle as well as specific scenes, among them Hitchcock’s scene on a subway train in which an obnoxious child is literally trying to pull Hitchcock’s hat over his eyes. It’s not widely known, but in his British years Hitchcock only rarely did walk-on appearances in his own movies; it wasn’t until he came to America in 1939 and made his first U.S. film, Rebecca, in 1940 that he established his tradition of doing a cameo in each and every film he made. Becoming Hitchcock also explores various running themes in Hitchcock’s work, including his interest in food (Hitchcock’s father was a London grocer, and anyone looking at Hitchcock’s physical dimensions would readily conclude that food was very important to him), his setting climaxes at historical landmarks (the British Museum here, later the Statue of Liberty and Mount Rushmore), and his use of special effects. This was something Hitchcock actually learned from his apprenticeship in Germany in the early 1920’s; Michael Balcon’s company had formed a co-production deal with a German studio called Emelka, under which Hitchcock made his first two films as a full-fledged director, The Pleasure Garden (1925) and the now-lost The Mountain Eagle a.k.a. Fear O’God (1926). While working in Germany he got to see the UFA Studios, the best-equipped in Europe, and watch Fritz Lang and Friedrich W. Murnau shoot their early masterpieces. Hitchcock remembered Murnau shooting a scene for The Last Laugh in a railroad station with a row of trains behind the main actors. Both the front train and the train all the way in back were real, with people getting on and off them, but the trains in between were all miniatures, built in perspective. Murnau invited Hitchcock to look through the viewfinder, through which Hitchcock saw people getting on and off the front train, people getting on and off the back train, and he noted the eye blended the row of trains together so they all looked real. Murnau told Hitchcock, “It doesn’t matter what you see on the set. All that matters is what the camera sees” – which Hitchcock said was the best advice he ever got on directing. Hitchcock also had been at UFA while Lang was shooting Die Nibelungen and was using the process-screen technology developed by his effects person, Eugen Schufftan, to create the broad vistas of that epic story.

When Hitchcock learned that he couldn’t shoot his big climax inside the real British Museum because the available light wasn’t strong enough and the museum’s exhibition rooms were too crowded to allow him to bring in lights, he decided to use Schufftan’s technology to recreate it in the studio. Worried that John Maxwell, British International’s production chief, would veto use of the Schufftan technology if he found out about it, Hitchcock had a dummy crew shooting an insert of a letter supposedly written by Alice confessing to Crewe’s murder while he did the scenes in which the big head of one of the ancient Egyptian pharaohs was patched in to the overall image via Schufftan’s process screen. (There’s an unintended irony in that the British Museum’s collection of ancient Egyptian artifacts was looted from Egypt while it was a British “protectorate,” and the Egyptian government is still futilely trying to get it all back: an interesting subtext for a film whose plot is based so strongly on crime and deceit.) Becoming Hitchcock has had three reviews on imdb.com so far, and two of them have been scathing towards its unseen host/narrator, African-American film critic Elvis Mitchell. One reviewer almost came out and called Mitchell a DEI hire: “I'd like to say that it's anyone's guess how Mitchell became a known personality ... but I think we all know the reason why – It certainly wasn't because of his insight, intelligence, or excitement.” Another reviewer said, “[T]he narration drove me to imdb to check whether it was generated by AI. Who talks like this? Apparently, Elvis Mitchell does. He speaks like he’s inserting random commas and periods in sentences. Very distracting. He’s also a monotone.” At least one particular in Mitchell’s narration drove me up the wall: his repeated references to Donald Calthorp, the actor who played Tracy the blackmailer, as “Calthrop.” He also claims Calthorp was primarily a stage actor who made very few films – yet imdb.com lists 64 film credits for Calthorp, including the posthumously released film of George Bernard Shaw’s Major Barbara (made in 1940, the year Calthorp died, but not released until 1941), and he’s particularly good as mad scientist Boris Karloff’s embittered disabled assistant in the 1936 British film The Man Who Changed His Mind (retitled The Man Who Lived Again for its American release).

Despite Mitchell’s problematic narration, Becoming Hitchcock scores points with me for including some odd and rare footage, including the sound test Hitchcock shot with Anny Ondra before deciding that her German accent made her totally unbelievable as a British shopgirl. So he reshot her scenes for the sound version in a manner similar to the ending of Singin’ in the Rain: he had British actress Joan Barry stand just off-camera with a microphone and Ondra lip-synched to Barry’s line readings. John Longden and Cyril Ritchard were interviewed in later years, and both recalled getting aches in their necks from having to move about on the set with their heads turned to face the concealed mikes, wherever they were, since this was made before the mike boom was invented (by Dorothy Arzner for Clara Bow’s first talkie, The Wild Party, in 1929). Becoming Hitchcock is a fascinating look at an early work by someone who’s often considered the greatest movie director of all time (not by me, though; if I had to pick a “greatest director of all time” it would be Fritz Lang) and how its images and techniques filtered down to his later, better-known masterpieces.