Blackmail

Blackmail, for historical purposes, is an interesting movie. It straddles the border of two of Alfred Hitchcock's eras: the silent film era and the pre-war talkies. And I do mean it straddles the line; the production began life as a silent film, but the go-ahead to make it a talkie was given mid-filming. As a result, there are both talking and silent versions of this movie, and the talking version using footage from the silent in some spots. It is evident more often than not; the silent-filmed scenes move faster, almost hyperactively, where the talking scenes are slower. Nowhere, though, is it more evident than the first 8 minutes of this movie, where, even though actors can be seen talking, there are no words audible. No intertitle cards either. It is bizarre and disorienting. It is a microcosm of the movie as a whole, a movie that literally exists across two eras of filmmaking but resides in neither. Blackmail is an awkward movie from start to finish. Awkwardly paced, awkwardly acted, and awkwardly assembled. The movie is about a woman, Alice, who is the girlfriend of a Scotland Yard detective, Frank. After a fight, she decides to spend the evening with an artist who had hit on her. The meeting turns violent, and she kills him in self-defense. She is wracked with guilt, and when Frank figures out she did it, he's torn as well, until a witness comes forward and starts ... well ... look at the title. All of this would make for a fine, simple thriller. Unfortunately, the pacing of this movie is out of whack. It is almost ten minutes before the movie introduces the main couple, thirty by the time the attack and murder happens, and an hour before the blackmailer shows up. This movie doesn't even hit the 90 minute mark, so to take it so slowly and linger on the set-up and Alice's guilt for so long makes Blackmail drag. When Tracy, the blackmailer, finally shows up, this part only lasts ten, maybe fifteen minutes total, before a chase and the denouement. That means, of an 85 minute movie, its titular premise, the thing that all the events have been building towards, adds up to a a sliver of it. Imagine if, in Die Hard, the terrorists didn't capture Nakatomi until 1:15, and at 1:30, John already has shot and killed Hans, and then there's ten minutes of clean-up. That's how this feels. A slasher movie can get away with back-loading the action because that's how they work; build-up, stalking, getting to know the characters, boom, eight of them die in ten minutes. But in a drama like this, spending so much time laying the groundwork leaves little time to actually execute the premise, leaving 3/4 of it feeling meandering, and 1/4 of it feeling rushed. The acting is also weird. Cyril Ritchard plays Crewe, the artist who attacks the heroine, Alice (Anny Ondra). He's playing a role we've all seen, the "nice guy" that turns out to be anything but. Problem is, that role also requires a certain sinister overtone that the audience can pick up on. A feeling of knowing this person is bad news. Crewe is played altogether too silly to feel like a threat to Alice. When the switch is flipped, it doesn't feel natural; it comes off as a requirement of the plot, not a development of the character. Anny Ondra, meanwhile, has her own issues, but hers are more mechanical. Born and raised in Prague, Ondra had a thick Czech accent that was deemed unsuitable for the role. Since post-dubbing wasn't a thing quite yet, there were only two options: recast and refilm with an actress that didn't have a linguistic challenge, or have someone off-screen say the lines and Ondry lip-synch to them. They went with the latter, and it shows. The tone of voice and the expressions and body language almost, but not quite, line up. She's fine when she isn't talking; the scenes of her walking through London, trying to process taking a life and being tormented by seeing things that remind her of it, is all really well done. She has a fantastic thousand-yard stare. But when she has to "talk", it starts to look like CGI humans in a video game. There's an uncanny valley aspect to it. As I mentioned before, because the movie switched gears mid-production, it is cobbled together from footage from both shoots. This is not only evident in action scenes, where the movement looks hyperkinetic until it cuts to a close-up and everything ssssssslllllllloooooooowwwwwwwwwssssssssss dddddddooooooowwwwwwwwwwnnnnnnnnn, but in other ways. There's more than a few shots where the actors aren't facing the camera, but there needed to be dialogue where an intertitle card would've been, so it was looped over. It's far from the worst ADR in the world, but you can tell what you're looking at and what you're hearing didn't happen at the same point in time. There are touches of Hitchcockian brilliance sprinkled throughout. The morning after the killing, Alice is at breakfast with her family, and someone who has heard about the murders won't stop talking about a knife; the dialogue is turned down so every word that isn't "knife" is muffled, but "knife" comes through like a church bell. All the while, Alice stares on at a loaf of bread, unable to pick up the knife. The chase near the end is also very Hitchcockian, occurring around and within (and on) a famous landmark. And the examination of the pressure of guilt is consistent all the way to the end, with Alice getting away with it and not really being happy about it. But the flaws of this movie do too much to hinder its potential, rendering it as little more than a mid-tier curiosity and historical footnote. It's not bad per se, and it is more watchable than the rich-people-squabbling of The Skin Game, or Jamaica Inn and its focus on the wrong character. And the moments of directorial excellence can't be disregarded. It just has too many small wounds to ever achieve what it could've been.