Hitchcock’s silent Blackmail is one of the best British films, if not the best, of the late 1920s. Made in 1929, during the transition to the sound era, it was commissioned as both a silent and as a part talkie with music and some dialogue scenes. With remarkable skill (and an eye to building a solid career in the new medium), Hitchcock managed to produce both a beautifully crafted silent and a ground- breaking sound version. Indeed, he tackled the considerable technical obstacles with such imagination that the latter has tended to obscure the reputation of the silent version, which is in fact superior in a number of ways. As Hitchcock said “The silent pictures were the purest form of cinema” and indeed the film contains more shots, more camera movement and the fluidity of the cutting conveys the narrative with greater style. Every scene counts and every shot either enhances the atmosphere or moves the story along. The opening eight minutes of the film is a tour de force of montage in which we see the forces of the Law hunt down and ‘process’ a career villain from capture to the police cell. Blackmail  displays many of the stylistic elements and themes with which Hitchcock would come to be associated: particularly a fascination with male sexual aggression and female vulnerability. Like the later Sabotage (1936) it features a woman who is protected from the Law by her policeman lover. It is also one of a number of Hitchcock’s films to feature a heroine who enters a dazed or ‘fugue’ state in which she acts mechanically and apparently without control of her actions– other examples are Murder! (1930), Sabotage and, more ambiguously, Vertigo (1958)  and  Psycho  (1960). The young Michael Powell, then a stills photographer, claimed to have suggested that the script should lose the  third  act of the original play, in which it is revealed that no murder has been committed, and end instead with a chase over the dome ofthe British Museum Reading Room. The Lodger and The Ring both have London locations, but this is undoubtedly the first of Hitchcock’s trademark set-piece finales. 

 The BFI National Archive holds the original negative of the silent version. However the negative had suffered extensively from ‘curling’ as a result of one side of the film stock having shrunk more than the other. The intertitles were present at full-length and have been preserved as part of the new master. The dissolves between shots are a crucial part of the film’s narration and, where possible, they have been reconstructed from the two separate shots. In the end, the restoration has produced an exceptionally clean picture which retains the essence, texture and beauty of the original photography. 

Bryony Dixon