Generally considered the first British ‘Talkie,’ Alfred Hitchcock must have seen which way the wind was blowing filming the silent version of BLACKMAIL with easy sound conversion in mind. So this story of attempted date rape/murder doesn’t play as if it were a silent film with a few dialogue scenes added late in the game, but like a (technically primitive) real synch-sound movie. More than that, where others were trying to use sound in completely natural ways, Hitch immediately goes experimental, with non-realistic effects on the soundtrack working with (and sometimes against) normal speech. It means that even when things miss their mark, the film remains a fascinating watch. Clerking at her father’s drug store, Anna Ondra (a Czech who had to be ‘live-dubbed’) walks out on her detective boyfriend to sneak off on a date with soigné artist Cyril Ritchard. The evening ends with an invite to come up and see my sketches. Forcing himself on the girl, Ondra finds a handy knife on the bedside table and . . . Honor intact, but now a murderer, she tidies up and gets out of there unaware a witness to the crime may try to blackmail her and her detective boyfriend who’s just been assigned to the case. Worse, he’s taken a piece of incriminating evidence pointing to Ondra that he found in the man’s garret. Yikes! (Not too believable, but Yikes just the same.) Confrontation; runaway villain; chase thru famous landmark The British Museum; spectacular fall to the death . . . the film is chockablock with elements Hitchcock would refine over his career, here in embryonic form. And all the way thru, clever solutions to Early Talkie inadequacies in sound recording that give rise to an extremely winning let’s-give-this-a-try/expressionistic kind of filmmaking.
SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY: A big success in both silent and sound release, BLACKMAIL makes the series of misfires that followed puzzling. The films not without interest (MURDER/’30 opens well), but Hitchcock is often weirdly off his form. And it took five long years before he found it again, this time for keeps, with major assists from Charles Bennett (he also wrote the play BLACKMAIL is taken from) and producer/savior Michael Balcon who got Hitch on THE MAN WHO KNEW TOO MUCH/'34. https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2013/04/the-man-who-knew-too-much-1934.html
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