*** (out of ****)
Starring Anny Ondra, John Longden, Donald Calthrop, and Cyril Ritchard.
Directed by Alfred Hitchcock & written for the screen by Hitchcock, Michael Powell, and Benn Levy, from the play by Charles Bennett
1929
84 min B&W NR
The United Kingdom’s first talking picture is a quickie made by no less than Alfred Hitchcock. Long, wordless stretches, intense facial expressions, and the occasional bad-dubbing reveal that “Blackmail” started life as a silent. It was given tongue to compete with the recent, runaway success of America’s (and the world’s) first talkie: Al Jolson’s “The Jazz Singer.” Hitchcock was not initially thrilled by the introduction of sound in pictures; he felt audible dialogue deprived film of some of its purity, tainting it with too many elements of novels or the theater. But part of his personal neuroses was his desire to seek the approval of the masses. He knew which way the winds were blowing, and they blew sound.
The allure of these early cheapies is the same as the allure of modern low-budget indie movies: ingenuity replaces physical resources, like elaborate sets, special effects, large casts, and heavy dialogue. We’re amazed at how much we’re drawn in by how little is there. Give any hack a huge budget, a million locations, and great actors, and you’ll get something palpable. But only the cream of the crop can rise when it has little with which to work.
“Blackmail” efficiently tells of a pair of lovers on the rocks: he (John Longden) is a bossy police officer, complaining whenever he doesn’t get special treatment, while she (Anny Ondra) is an impulsive two-timer. After a fight, she goes out with a lusty, sweet-talking painter (Cyril Ritchard) just to spite her cop boyfriend. The painter plies her with liquor, tries to get her in a model’s costume, and tosses off “unintentional” insults every time she tries to leave.
When the painter ends up dead, a blackmailer (Donald Calthrop) appears on the scene. (The blackmailer is, of course, a voyeur, but then again so was little fat kid Alfred on the playground.) The movie’s central, most Hitchcockian sequence is in the girl’s family shop, where the blackmailer uses implication and innuendo to reveal what he knows without her family or the customers catching on. In true Hitchcock manner, our sympathies change throughout the course of the film: at first we sympathize with the couple because she killed the rape-minded painter in self-defense. The cop glares at the blackmailer, more in indignation than in fear.
But we start to side with the blackmailer when we discover that he’s a little unkempt, ragged, and an occasional beggar. He’s not out to ruin the couple but simply to get some spending cash, a cigar, and a home-cooked meal at a family table. So when the police are hot on his trail, through the British Museum no less, we want him to escape. There’s a great moment where the cop learns some dirt on the blackmailer and his demeanor changes completely from animal dread to self-righteous smugness. It’s not a million miles away from the abrupt POV shot in “A Clockwork Orange,” of cops looming overhead, in which we find ourselves instantly siding with villainous Malcolm McDowell instead of with the law.
“Blackmail” is acutely aware that poverty is the major cause of crime. When we first meet the cop, he is arresting a man in a poor neighborhood. One of the locals throws a brick through the window at him, an eloquent illustration of where the neighborhood’s sympathies lie. Circle imagery (telephones, a revolver, spinning tires) is used throughout. In “Hitchcock/Truffaut,” Hitchcock reveals that two endings were shot (SPOILER WARNING!), one in which the girl is arrested, and one in which the cop uses his position to get her away scot-free. Either way, the movie is like a circle, ending back where it began. When she is arrested, the movie begins as it ends, with the merciless blindness of the law: the cop books and fingerprints her just like the fugitive at the beginning. When she is free, we end with an outsized continuation of the lover’s quarrel that marks our first encounter with the two lovers: he thinks because he is a cop, he can force his will on others and exist outside the rules. Early on, when she complains that he is running late, he retorts “Do you expect the entire machinery of Scotland Yard to be held up for you?” Oh, the irony.
It’s debatable which ending is more cynical: when the man indifferently turns the woman in, or when the man reveals that the law means nothing to him except an opportunity to exercise his will over others. As in so many of Hitchcock’s films, the rich and powerful think they can get away with things just because they’re rich and powerful (“Dial M for Murder,” “Vertigo,” “North by Northwest,” “Strangers on a Train,” and even the sleazebag investor in “Psycho”). The blackmailer, in a sense, could almost see himself as an avenging angel, righting society’s imbalances.
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