General · EdgepediaOctober 3, 20265 min read

Blackmail (1929 film)

Blackmail is a 1929 British thriller directed by Alfred Hitchcock, in which Alice White, a London shopgirl, kills an artist who tries to assault her and is then blackmailed by a witness to the killing. It was made in both silent and sound versions, and the sound version is generally regarded as Britain's first feature-length talkie.¹^•²

Key fact	Detail
Director / producer	Alfred Hitchcock; produced by John Maxwell for British International Pictures at Elstree Studios¹^•³
Source	Adapted by Charles Bennett from his own 1928 hit play, the first of several Hitchcock collaborations²
Two versions	Shot as a silent, then partly reshot for sound; it is both Hitchcock's last silent film and his first talkie⁴
Historical status	The sound version was Britain's first feature-length talkie, released in November 1929 as "The First British Talkie!"⁵
Lead cast	Anny Ondra (Alice White), John Longden (Detective Frank Webber), Cyril Ritchard (Crewe the artist), Donald Calthrop (Tracy)⁶
Voice dubbing	Joan Barry spoke Ondra's lines off-camera to mask her Czech accent²
Running time	82 minutes per BFI records; the BBFC lists 86 minutes and the BFI Southbank silent-version print 76 minutes¹^•⁷^•³

Spoilers

Plot

Alice White is the girlfriend of Frank Webber, a Scotland Yard detective. After the couple quarrels, she goes home with Crewe, an artist who invites her to "pose" for him. When he attempts to sexually assault her, she stabs him with a knife and flees, leaving a glove behind. Webber is assigned to the case, recognizes the glove, and hides it to protect her. Tracy, a small-time crook who saw her enter the studio and holds her other glove, tries to blackmail the couple; meanwhile suspicion falls on Tracy himself, since Crewe's landlady saw him leaving the building that night.⁸^•⁹

The film opens with a Flying Squad car racing across London as the police hunt a wanted criminal, and closes with a chase in and atop the British Museum.¹

Production and the two versions

Hitchcock had made nine silent features before Blackmail and began it in 1929 as a silent picture.⁹ As British cinemas wired for sound, producer John Maxwell set up a temporary sound stage with RCA equipment imported from America, and the producers asked Hitchcock to add a sound finale to the climactic British Museum chase, following the model of The Jazz Singer (1927). Hitchcock instead shot the entire film with sound in mind, re-shooting his dialogue scenes, and later told François Truffaut that he had worked out the film for all-sound technique in advance so he could demand to reshoot scenes when the producers changed direction.⁵^•²^•⁴

The dubbing of Anny Ondra. The Czech-born lead actress had a pronounced accent, so Joan Barry spoke her lines off-camera into a microphone while Ondra mouthed the words on set. A New York Times critic of the time apparently took the effect at face value, writing that Ondra "does not speak with any noticeable foreign accent."²^•⁸ A 42-second sound test from April or May 1929, preserved by the BFI, shows Hitchcock teasing Ondra on camera as she tried out the new equipment; she never speaks in the finished sound version.¹⁰

The British Museum chase. Little light was available at the actual locations, so Hitchcock used the Schüfftan process, combining live action with backlit transparencies of the museum reflected in a partly scraped mirror. Believing the effects would delay production and overrun the budget, he made them without Maxwell's knowledge, keeping a cover camera ostensibly photographing a letter insert in case anyone from the production office appeared.⁴^•⁵

Sound design

The film is renowned for its expressionist use of sound. In the breakfast scene after the killing, the gossiping chatter around Alice fades until she hears only the word "knife," repeated in a rising crescendo that becomes a scream as she relives the crime. Hitchcock treated sound as a tool for irony and subjectivity as much as for dialogue, and one contemporary critic called the film "the most intelligent compromise between talk and pictures that has yet been found."⁵^•¹¹

Release and reception

Blackmail was an event on its release in November 1929, advertised as "The First British Talkie!" Critics responded strongly, and Michael Powell, then the film's stills photographer and later the director of Peeping Tom (1960), wrote in his autobiography that it put Hitchcock "on top of the heap." A poll of moviegoers voted it the best British film of 1929.⁵^•⁹ BFI Screenonline's Mark Duguid describes it as "a critical and commercial triumph" that "confirmed Hitchcock as the most admired British director of the time."¹

The film also marked Hitchcock's first true cameo appearance, seated on a train behind his two leading actors; he had appeared briefly in The Lodger (1926) only because of a shortage of extras.⁵

Legacy and restoration

The knife murder and the landmark-set chase anticipated sequences in The 39 Steps (1935), Saboteur (1942), North by Northwest (1959), and most famously Psycho (1960).¹^•⁵ Both the silent and sound versions were restored by the BFI National Archive in association with STUDIOCANAL as part of the BFI's "Rescue the Hitchcock 9" program, completed in 2012, with principal funding from The Hollywood Foreign Press Association and The Film Foundation; the original camera negative was scanned at 4K resolution and damaged sections re-scanned with a wet-gate.⁶^•⁹

References

Initially written Oct 3, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 3, 2026; Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 15, 2026; Oct 25, 2026; Nov 1, 2026