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In terms of sound, the initial scenes in Blackmail are utterly devoid of anything bar a stirring musical accompaniment. As a result they're quite confusing; we get to see police officer Frank Webber (John Longden) arrest a miscreant for who knows what offence. It all looks rather like they share a gentlemen's club, a parade of knowing looks uninterrupted even by the pulling of a gun. As they get in the squad van, a couple of mechanical clanks jump out, then quiet again. Suddenly, just like that, we get to eavesdrop on the banal conversation of two detectives strolling down a corridor. With their backs to us, and nothing interesting to say, it's a strange welcome to the 'talkie'.
What's perhaps most disconcerting is the way in which you miss the little noises, those creaks and shuffles that give ambience to our aural universe. In Blackmail they're essentially absent, only present when marking a particular point and then amplified, distorted by the occasion. This probably wouldn't matter much were it not for the film's basic superficiality, both in plot and delivery. In a modern flick this amount of material would be covered in a few scenes but here you feel every one of its eighty-six minutes. Not that Hitchcock doesn't include a few flashes of brilliance (think kitchen knives and a museum chase) but the odds are stacked against him.
The chief culprits are the cast members, each and every one brought up on the melodrama of silent-era epics. Thus their acting style is based upon flashing eyes and wild gestures, emotional beacons when contrasted with the more naturalistic style in vogue today. Inevitably then Alice White (Anny Ondra), the heroine, is a study of intense concentration crossed with a thorough lack of proportion. She skips across the register of feelings, listing from joy to despair, simultaneously frustrating and to be pitied. Still, at least Alice makes an impression. In contrast Frank stumbles through Blackmail like a zombie, a two-dimensional copper; The Sweeney this is not.
Put simply Frank and, by association, the script demonstrate little in the way of moral ambiguity. It's all black and white (no pun intended), the bad guys are irredeemable and the good guys are champion, even when their actions are questionable. This could be the fault of playwright Charles Bennett, the original author, but one suspects that the translation is at fault here. In fact, it makes you wonder what scripts for silent films were really like. Did they have any dialogue at all or did Hitchcock just make it all up (in this instance)? Whichever, one can only be impressed by the real silent movie stars, actors who made you care about their characters despite lacking a voice. Now that's talent.
Technically, the vintage of Blackmail broadcasts itself through the many static, mid-range shots. Cameraman Jack E. Cox provides a few rapid cuts and a couple of close-ups but they're the exception since these techniques had yet to enter the average punter's visual vocabulary. More interesting is the way in which Hitchcock uses a woman's scream to link two related scenes of surprise, effectively cutting between the two. As an indication of what's to come it's notable, though scarcely significant to distinguish this early production. Basically it's a piece of transitional fluff, worth catching from a historical perspective but hardly top-notch entertainment.
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