Blackmail

Alfred Hitchcock made a confident and impressive transition from silent cinema to the sound era with this 1929 thriller. Based on the titular play by Charles Bennett, Blackmail stars Czech-born actress Anny Ondra as Alice White, a young woman who kills a man in self-defense. John Longden stars as her fiancé, Frank Webber, a police detective who tries to protect Alice when she’s blackmailed by a petty criminal. Begun as a silent film, it was also reworked for the new sound technology, becoming England's first all-talkie feature. The striking dialogue-free opening sequence was shot and edited as a silent film with music and sound effects added later, but Hitchcock experimented with sound for dramatic effect in other scenes, such as using source music and emphasizing the word "knife" in the dialogue of gossiping neighbors to express the torment of the heroine. The simultaneously produced silent version is a tighter, more fluid, and more dramatically exciting film but the sound version remains a landmark for Hitchcock's creative approach to the then-new medium. Previously only available on poor home video versions, Kino presents remastered editions of the sound version in two different aspect ratios, plus the silent version with a musical score by Mont Alto Motion Picture Orchestra. Extras include an introduction by film scholar Noël Simsolo, audio commentary by film historian Tim Lucas, Ondra's screen test, and an audio clip from the "Hitchcock/Truffaut" interviews. Highly recommended. (S. Axmaker)