alr

Blackmail

Live Musical Accompaniment
Screening on Film
Recently Restored
Directed by Alfred Hitchcock.
With Anny Ondra, Sara Allgood, John Longden.
UK, 1929, 35mm, black & white, silent, 75 min.
Print source: Rialto

Released to accommodate unconverted theaters, the silent Blackmail is leaner than the sound version and all the more disquieting for its subtle shifts in perspective. A documentary-style prologue establishes the rule of law in swift, precise strokes, but culpability ultimately proves elusive after a young woman grabs for a kitchen knife to defend herself from a darkly intimated rape. No sooner has the woman’s policeman boyfriend determined to cover up her crime than a supremely confident blackmailer materializes at the family shop. Hitchcock undercuts easy moral dualities at every turn, masterfully interspersing subjective and objective views for his first sustained exploration of the transference of guilt. A most Hitchcockian climax set at the British Museum was suggested to the director by a young Michael Powell, and the film was adapted from a play by Charles Bennett, the screenwriter who would go on to pen several of Hitchcock’s most characteristic Thirties' films.

Part of film series

Read more

The Hitchcock 9

Read more

The Complete Alfred Hitchcock

Other film series with this film

Read more

Silent Hitchcock

Current and upcoming film series

Read more

Jean-Pierre Bekolo, 2024 McMillan-Stewart Fellow

Read more

The Practice (and Other Works) By Martín Rejtman

Read more

Chronicles of Changing Times. The Cinema of Edward Yang

Read more
Gene Hackman crouched beside a toilet with audio equipment

From the HFA Collection...

Read more

Being In a Place. Rediscovering Margaret Tait