Blackmail (sound version) (British International Pictures, 1929)

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

After Becoming Hitchcock on January 15 Turner Classic Movies showed the film that the documentary claimed was the source for much of Alfred Hitchcock’s later greatness: Blackmail (1929), his 10th completed feature and first film with sound. Blackmail began as a play by Charles Bennett in 1928 which was produced in London but ran for only 39 performances despite – or maybe because of – its star, American actress Tallulah Bankhead (whom it’s difficult to imagine as a British shopgirl who was picked up by a shady artist, repelled by his advances and ultimately killed him in self-defense). British International Pictures bought the movie rights to Blackmail and assigned it to Alfred Hitchcock, who was already one of the two most highly regarded directors in Britain (Robert Stevenson was the other). Hitchcock shot Blackmail as a silent movie, casting part-German, part-Czech actress Anny Ondra as the female lead, Alice White; John Longden as her boyfriend, Scotland Yard police detective Frank Webber; Cyril Ritchard as Crewe, the artist who picks Alice up, takes her back to his place, tries to rape her and gets killed by Alice in self-defense; and Donald Calthorp as Tracy, the blackmailer. Then British International production chief John Maxwell (whom Hitchcock couldn’t stand) called Hitchcock into his office and announced that the studio had just acquired sound equipment from the American company RCA. Maxwell ordered Hitchcock to concoct some sound sequences for Blackmail so it could be released as a part-talking film. Hitchcock had other ideas; he wanted to reshoot enough of Blackmail so it would qualify as an all-talking film. Actually, long stretches of the “sound” version of Blackmail were simply carried over from the silent version, fortified with dubbed-in music, sound effects and the sorts of “wild” voices, not definitively identified with any specific actor, that were frequently stuck onto films originally shot silent in the early days of the transition. There isn’t a single word of dialogue linked to an on-screen cast member until about 10 minutes into this 85-minute movie.

Ironically, the most powerful moments in Blackmail are the ones shot silent: Alice’s nocturnal walk through the streets of London after she’s killed Crewe, with the light-hearted song of seduction he sang her turned into a dirge (the song is called “Miss Up-to-Date” and represents Crewe’s assumption that Alice is a modern, sexually liberated woman instead of the innocent virgin she is, a mistake which is literally fatal to him) and the final chase scene through the British Museum. Blackmail is also full of devices Hitchcock used throughout his career, including the hero-heroine-villain love triangle (used again in such later Hitchcocks as The Secret Agent, 1936; Notorious, 1946; and North by Northwest, 1959); the shared guilt of Alice and Frank as he withholds the evidence (Alice’s missing glove, “planted” in an earlier scene in which Alice loses the glove in a restaurant and Frank retrieves it; later he discovers the glove in Crewe’s apartment as one of the cops investigating the murder but pockets it rather than turning it over; in a way Blackmail is The Maltese Falcon in reverse: the detective protests his killer girlfriend instead of turning her in, and Dashiell Hammett first published The Maltese Falcon the same year Blackmail was made, 1929); the painting of a court jester that is Crewe’s last completed work, and which Alice vandalizes with the same knife she used to kill Crewe as she’s leaving his studio; and the overall cynicism towards the law and its credentialed enforcers. I haven’t been able to find a copy of Charles Bennett’s original play online, so I haven’t been able to see if it ends either the way the film does or the way Hitchcock originally wanted it to, but Hitchcock planned a more cynical ending in which Alice’s written confession would make it to Frank’s supervisor, she’d be arrested for the crime, and she’d go through the same elaborate processing by the police the unnamed suspect in another crime went through at the beginning. Then there’d be an exchange between Frank and one of his fellow officers in which the colleague would say, “What are you doing tonight, Frank – going out with your girl?” Frank wouldn’t answer, because his “girl” is the person they’ve just arrested, booked and locked up.

Instead, just as Alice is about to confess all to the supervisor, his phone rings and Frank distracts her and tells her not to go through with it. After all, the police had pinned the murder on Tracy the blackmailer, and given that he’d died in a fall from the skylight of the British Museum as the police were chasing him, it’s not like Alice has to risk feeling guilty about someone taking the rap and possibly being hanged for a killing she committed. Technically, Blackmail is one of the better talkies of the period; though there are highly stagy scenes in which characters talk unusually slowly (a hallmark of the early sound years, when the sound engineers overruled directors and told actors to talk in this highly stilted way, pausing between their cue and their own line), and John Longden and Cyril Ritchard both recalled getting neck aches from the way they had to twist their heads to aim their mouths at the hidden microphones, it’s also a film that moves quite effectively and illustrates how good Hitchcock would eventually get in stories like this. (Film historian Maurice Yacowar noted that of Hitchcock’s first 17 films, only four were in the mystery/suspense genre that would eventually become his specialty.) In 1930, film historian Paul Rotha published a book called The Film Till Now and cited Blackmail as one of the few “good talkies,” but he was taking a patronizing view of it and invidiously comparing it to Sergei Eisenstein’s silent masterpiece, Battleship Potemkin. Rotha predicted that Potemkin would remain in circulation for decades, while Blackmail would quickly be forgotten. Today, both Eisenstein and Hitchcock are regarded as two of the greatest filmmakers of all time, and Blackmail remains in circulation not only for its historical importance as Hitchcock’s first talkie but as a compelling entertainment in its own right (even though Hitchcock would not make a film I would regard as a masterpiece until his awesome Rich and Strange two years later).