Starring: ANNY ONDRA
Directed by: ALFRED HITCHCOCK.
Alfred Hitchcock was one of that
select band of directors whose success
has always been reflected equally in
the notices of the critics and the
returns at the box-office. He was an
artist and an innovator who never lost
the common touch.
After entering films as a designer of silent captions 'Hitch' had already established himself as a successful director, and had finished Blackmail (1929) as a silent movie, when the coming of sound revolutionized the cinema. So enormous was the impact of the new 'talkies' that it was decided to remake the film with sound.
Hitchcock revealed an intuitive mastery of the new medium which was all the more remarkable in that his star, Army Ondra, was German and spoke so little English that her voice had to be dubbed by the English actress Joan Barry.
By a variety of ingenious twists and inventions which came to be known as the 'Hitchcock touch' the director had already become familiar to ordinary cinemagoers.
In the new
talking-pictures he was equally
determined to make his personal
mark. He demonstrated his
appreciation of the possibilities of
the new medium in the famous knife
sequence, where the heroine sitting at
the breakfast table while a neighbour
expounds on the un-British nature of
murder by stabbing, is abruptly asked
by her father to pass the bread-knife.
Another Hitchcock innovation - in the heyday of the 'gifted amateur' detective - was to show a murder investigation as a routine police affair, with the complication that the crime was committed by the girlfriend of one of the investigating detectives.
The outstanding use of real London
surroundings - Scotland Yard, a
Lyons tea-shop, Piccadilly Circus at
theatre-closing time -and the
hair-raising ending at the British
Museum, ensure the continued
interest of Blackmail as exciting
entertainment in its own right and a
permanent landmark in the crime
genre and the whole of cinema
history.
JACK IBBERSON
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Distributed by: EMI |
This page was last updated 02 Dec 2002