Blackmail was the first major British sound film. Tom Ryall examines its unusual production history, and places it in the context of Hitchcock's other British films of the period. Each volume in the "BFI Film Classics" series contains a personal commentary on the film and a filmography.
Today,
Blackmail is not as well known as
Rear Window or
Psycho, but it is one of Alfred Hitchcock's most important early films. Made in 1929 and advertised as the first British talking picture, it already contains many of its director's trademark touches. The film also experiments brilliantly with the new medium of sound. At a critical point, Hitchcock enters the mind of a young woman just after she has stabbed an assailant. Guilt-ridden, she returns home in time for breakfast and overhears a conversation in which the word "knife" is continually mentioned. In her consciousness, and on the soundtrack, "knife" grows louder with each repetition until the heroine can hear only that single word echoing accusingly.
With this little book, part of the British Film Institute's series on the classics of the international cinema, Tom Ryall discusses the aspects of Blackmail that would resonate throughout the director's career. He also offers an informative history of the British film industry's conversion to sound and the contributions Blackmail made to the new medium. Summing up his arguments, Ryall states that Blackmail "is a traditional film insofar as it provides a summary of conventional silent film style and narration; it is revolutionary, in its bold use of the novel techniques of sound; it is modern in its self-consciously 'artistic' mode of narration; and it is postmodern in its eclectic stylistic character. As well as being a key film in the history of sound pictures, it is also a landmark film in cinema generally." --Raphael Shargel
