© 2007 William Ahearn
“Blackmail” would be a great opening film for a double feature with “Sabotage.” Both films deal with the idea of the redeemable bad girl and in both cases the bad girls are killers who have ties with the police.
This is Hitchcock’s first sound film and one of his best visually.
To me, it’s the early films that display his visual story telling. “The
Lodger,” “Number 17” and even “Rich and Strange”
have a far better vocabulary than would be apparent in later films.
“Blackmail” is the story of a young woman who is dating
a police detective. Her roving eye settles on an artist one night in a nightclub.
She goes home with him and ends up stabbing him to death while he’s
raping her.
There would be no movie if she reported the incident to the
police, so she runs. Her detective boyfriend immediately begins to suspect
her and steals an incriminating piece of evidence from the crime scene. When
he confronts his girlfriend with the evidence in a public place he’s
overheard by a petty criminal who initiates a blackmail scheme.
Turnabout is fair play, as the British are fond of saying, and soon
the blackmailer is being sought as the suspect in the murder.
What becomes interesting in “Blackmail” is that you have
an innocent man – at least innocent of murder – on the run but
instead of meeting a perky young babe who first resists and then accepts his
innocence and then his love, he ends up falling through the roof of the British
Museum to his death.
The police detective convinces the girl not to confess and they live
happily ever after. It’s odd that in this film as well as “Sabotage,”
those actions have no real consequences – legally or spiritually –
if the police end up with the girl.
An interesting film and some of Hitchcock’s better filmmaking.