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Blackmail (1929)

While the larger portion of Hitchcock’s earlier films were significant in their time, only a few have transcended time and reached an receptive audience in today’s time.  This is certainly one of those films. It’s the story of a woman who is bored with her current boyfriend and goes out to find a more exciting man. 

She meets with an artist one evening, and after a short stretch of mutual teasing and flirting, he decides it’s time to make the love. She’s not so keen in the idea and when push comes to shove, she murders him with a bread knife.  Well, it just so happens that her forgotten boyfriend is a detective at Scotland Yard and helps conceal the evidence and hide her identity. 

But there was a witness and the blackmailing begins. This project was not only Hitchcock’s first “talkie”, but England’s as a whole.  It was originally shot as a silent picture, but later, when the technology became available, certain scenes were reshot and sound was dubbed over what was left.

The amazing thing about this film is that Hitchcock didn’t just sit back and think about wonderful he was that he could make a film that talked.  On many occasion he actually manipulated voices and sound to enunciate a point.   That’s absolutely brilliant.  Also, this is the first appearance of birds in any Hitchcock film.  He frequently used birds in his films to represent chaos or disorder. This point was driven home in his 1963 film, The Birds.

(Written and directed by Hitchcock)

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