Blackmail (Alfred Hitchcock, 1929)

Cyril Ritchard and Anny Ondra in Blackmail

Alice White: Anny Ondra, Joan Barry
Frank Webber: John Longden
Tracy: Donald Calthrop
The Artist: Cyril Ritchard
Mrs. White: Sara Allgood
Mr. White: Charles Paton
The Landlady: Hannah Jones
The Chief Inspector: Harvey Braban

Director: Alfred Hitchcock
Screenplay: Alfred Hitchcock, Benn W. Levy
Based on a play by Charles Bennett
Cinematography: Jack E. Cox
Film editing: Emile de Ruelle
Music: Jimmy Campbell, Reginald Connelly

Anny Ondra has the distinction of having appeared in both Alfred Hitchcock's final silent film, The Manxman (1929), and his first talkie, Blackmail. Unfortunately, it was the arrival of sound that put an end to her nascent career in English-language films. Blackmail was begun as a silent movie, but not long after filming started Hitchcock got what he wanted: permission to turn it into a talkie. Which presented a problem for Ondra, who was born in a part of the Austro-Hungarian empire that is now Poland and grew up in Prague, where she was a successful stage actress, and had been unable to lose her accent. In the infancy of film sound, a satisfactory technique of dubbing another actor's voice had yet to be developed, so actress Joan Barry was hired to speak Alice White's lines off-camera as Ondra silently mouthed the words. (After Blackmail, Ondra returned to the continent and was a major star in Czech and German films; she married boxer Max Schmeling in 1933.) The tricky problem of synching Barry's voice with Ondra's performance only spurred Hitchcock to other innovative uses of sound, for example the scene in which Alice White, stunned by having stabbed her assailant to death, hears a neighbor chattering about the murder and repeating the word "knife," which becomes increasingly louder until Alice breaks down in hysterics. Hitchcock also pioneers a gag he will use again: Alice opens her mouth to scream, but in a quick cut the scream comes from the landlady who has discovered the victim's body. The cut anticipates the one in The 39 Steps (1935) in which a woman's scream becomes the shrill whistle of a locomotive. Sound was still such a novelty that a silent version of Blackmail was made for theaters still not equipped for it. And even in the sound version the first six minutes of the film, which take place in the streets where the London police "flying squad" makes an arrest, are silent except for the background music, even though we see cops talking to each other and there are plenty of opportunities for ambient sound. Some scenes also have that curious slackness of pace of early talkies, as if the directors were uncertain about how quickly audiences could assimilate spoken dialogue. But it's far more "Hitchcockian" than most of his late silent films in that he's working effectively with thriller material, including a chase through the British Museum that anticipates his later exploitation of such landmarks as the Statue of Liberty in Saboteur (1942) and Mount Rushmore in North by Northwest (1959). It also contains the longest of Hitchcock's familiar cameo appearances, as a passenger on the Underground being tormented by a small boy.

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