just watch it!

Great visuals, story delivers no surprises

Excellent, a Must See

The biggest problem with this movie is it’s a little better than you think it might be, which somehow makes it worse. As in, it takes itself a bit too seriously, which makes most of the movie feel kind of dull.

2.5/4This is one of Hitchcock's earliest works and his first notable "talkie", but as a story, there is a lot lacking. The performance delivered by Ondra was impressive, and definitely the best on the set, as her hallucinations and trauma seemed very convincing. The fate of the story really rests on the lead's shoulders, and in Blackmail, it was a particularly heavy burden.The first 5 or so minutes is silent. You can see people talking, but no sound, only a score. Then, all of a sudden, our female lead steps in and the voices kick in. Her boyfriend is a cop, but she has dinner arrangements with an aspiring artist. When she goes home with him, he tries to rape her and as he does, she fatally stabs him. She quickly covers up any evidence that she was there, and makes an escape. Her boyfriend finds out and tries to cover it up for her so she won't get arrested, but an unlikely witness blackmails her.Interestingly enough, the plot never truly felt wrapped up. To my surprise, they didn't reconcile and establish the outcome of the case, and instead left it to the interpreter. It definitely isn't Hitch's best, even for the late 20's and early 30's, but it's definetely good in both the objective and subjective sense.

Directed by Alfred Hitchcock, who adapted the Charles Bennett play, this slightly above average drama is credited with being the first British sound film. Unfortunately, the sound quality is abysmal. After watching it on TCM, I learned from Robert Osborne that the lead actress's (Anny Ondra, from Austria-Hungary - now Poland) lines were being dubbed in real-time (by Joan Barry, uncredited) off "stage", which helped explain a bit of this (but not all of it).This film opens with a 10 minute long sequence, done strictly with music like a silent film (since the film was shot during the transition period; the silent version released is said to be better than this sound one), which is outstanding. It establishes several locales and police officer characters.Alice White (Ondra), who maintains an "on again, off again" relationship dating Detective Frank Webber (John Longden), flirts with an artist (Cyril Ritchard) while dining with her beau. After dumping the detective, she goes with the artist to his apartment where she goes too far to be shocked by his advances. When he won't be denied her sexual favors, she kills him with a bread knife and flees. However, she was seen leaving by a moocher (Donald Calthrop) who was hanging out nearby and entered the apartment building after she fled.After a sleepless night walking the streets in frightened despair, Alice sneaks upstairs to her bedroom which happens to be above her family's cigar shop. Her mother (Sara Allgood) visits her room just after she'd gotten into bed and tells her to come have breakfast. Alice joins her family (her father is played by Charles Paton) and a neighbor who, naturally, are discussing the (now discovered) murder that occurred the previous night. Preoccupied, Alice hears nothing besides the work KNIFE being spoken over and over again.Detective Webber arrives and has a brief conversation with his girlfriend, in the shop's phone-booth, about the glove of hers he'd found, and concealed from the other detectives, at the crime scene. While showing it to her, the moocher turned blackmailer, enters the phone-booth to reveal he's got her other glove! My favorite scene follows, and I won't spoil it other than to say that the prey (the Scotland Yard detective and his girl) turn the tables on their blackmailer, which leads to the requisite Hitchcock chase. This transition, including the realization on the detective's and then the blackmailer's faces, is done quite well.Additionally, it's interesting to see flashes of the master that Hitchcock would become: the use of an institution, in this case a museum complete with an Egyptian statue and harrowing rooftop, as a backdrop for the chase (ala Saboteur (1942) and North by Northwest (1959), and the women's screams (Ondra's with the landlady's that discovers the body) that are combined ala The 39 Steps (1935) (e.g. with a train whistle).

The premise of an "accidental" murder was visited by Hitchcock many times during his career and is central to the movie. Sadly, the result, originally planned as a silent with a number of scenes re-shot with sound and sound FX added to external shots is lumpy and uneven. Hitch, who was originally a writer of the dialog cards shown through silent movies didn't yet grasp the value of the spoken word and subtle acting for the camera. Consequently there is much hammy mugging to express anger, sadness, dismay and panic. Anny Oudra, subsequently a BIG star in German and Czech movies is very attractive but the need to dub another actress's voice in a disastrous "cut glass" accent, totally wrong for a store keeper's daughter is an epic fail. Similarly, Donald Calthrop, the blackmailer adopts a stage London accent that hovers somewhere between Claridges and Bethnal Green. The most egregious casting has to be John Longden as the hunky leading man, he wears an ill fitting suit, too short in the sleeve and leg and spends much of his time with his hands either in his pockets or massaging them menacingly at chest level. He seems to have only three expressions, anger, with dark brows furrowed, joy, with a rictus of a smile and baffled, with head cocked and eyes half closed.The movie has a place in history but as a story it is uneven and pedestrian and sunk by the limited skills of it's leading players.

"Blackmail", a 1929 early Hitchcock film, was a revelation to me, much like his later "Young and Innocent". It contains so many of his later themes, which he honed to perfection through the years. Inept policemen, obligatory leg shots of his leading lady (Anny Ondra), and eventually the classic 'wrong man' (although his 'wrong man' is the villain of the piece, the blackmailer). This is a very dark film, in its way. There are no 'heroes'. Anny Ondra is childish as she steps into the short dress the artist (Cyril Ritchard) has presented her. In a previous scene, we have seen her deviously getting rid of her boyfriend to share a tryst with the artist. The cop, played by stone-faced John Longden, is revealed as a prideful bully, not interested in the 'law' at all, but rather scheming to blackmail the blackmailer. The themes of guilt are displayed in a very graphic way. A man's arm hanging out of a transom reminds Alice (Ondra) of the artist's arm as it dangled from his bed after she stabbed him. In a truly inventive scene, Alice stares at a flashing neon sign of a martini glass, above the word 'cocktails'. But as her conscience sees it, the glass becomes a hand, holding a knife plunging down. What holds the movie together is the artist's painting of a court jester. The face of the jester is startling realistic, like a photograph, and we see it mocking Alice, It mocks Frank the cop, too. At one point, the face hits the audience in closeup, as if it were mocking the audience. As in 'The 39 Steps', there are lingering shots of his leading lady's legs. (Although it was never done so cleverly as Madeleine Carroll in handcuffs from 'The 39 Steps'.) The ending is fairly black, too. Alice has decided to come clean about the murder, but, too late. The blackmailer has died in his escape to flee the police. Enter Frank the detective, who intervenes and allows Scotland Yard to believe that the wrong man murdered the artist. The movie ends with peals of laughter and there is that grotesque face of the jester staring at us yet again.Hitchcock appears in a rather indulgent cameo with a child who keeps grabbing at his hat.The movie begins as a silent movie with a long, drawn out police chase, arrest and imprisonment of a suspect. This would be repeated years later much more agonizingly in Hitchcock's later "The Wrong Man". In his later years, Hitchcock would always portray cops as inept and foolish, but "Blackmail" is pretty much "cop as criminal". It would be great to see these early Hitchcock movies restored. "Young and Innocent", "Murder!" and this film would get more viewings if the source material was improved. While not a 'masterpiece', as is 'The 39 Steps', 'Blackmail' finds Hitchcock....well, quite "Hitchcockian" for a young man.