Laurent Bouzereau – Becoming Hitchcock: The Legacy of Blackmail (2024)
Exploring Hitchcock’s iconic style through his early film “Blackmail,” an insight into the director’s emerging techniques and themes during the transition to talkies, showcasing elements that would define his later masterpieces.
Nedland Media wrote:
Based entirely on archive material, the film explores the famous Hitchcock touch, through the making of one of his benchmark films, “Blackmail,” released in 1929 at the dawn of the Talkies. Often referred to as the first British sound feature film, the film also exists in a silent version. Several sequences were reshot for the sound version.
By comparing the two, Bouzereau creates a novel way of exploring Hitchcock’s trademark themes such as murder, suspense, food and sexuality, providing a taste of what was to come in masterpieces like “Psycho,” “North by Northwest” and “The Birds” 30 years later.
“I wanted to mention the historical backdrop of what was happening in the industry but also really recognise Hitchcock as an auteur, very much like you look at painters and you recognise Picasso’s Blue Period, for example. Filmmakers of the caliber of Hitchcock are the same: they latch onto themes that interest them and, throughout their careers, they go back to these themes with different visual approaches,” he tells Variety.
As an example, the director cites what he calls Hitchcock’s “obsession with food,” describing a scene in “Blackmail” where Alice, the main character, a beautiful blonde – he was obsessed early on with them – kills an assailant with a bread knife that she grabs by his bed.
“The knife is on a table right by his bed with a loaf of bread, which is very intentional – how many people have a loaf of bread by their bed?” Bouzereau says with a smile. “That theme of food, particularly linked to seduction or sex and murder, is echoed throughout Hitchcock’s body of work.
“I find that fascinating, because it’s done in a way that’s so relatable – one thing we all have in common is that we must eat – so you’re immediately in. It’s twisted and mischievous but very clever and oftentimes very visual,” adds Bouzereau, who says it’s important to remember that Hitchcock started making films in the silent era, which explains why he relied heavily on visuals to tell a story.
“Even prior to “Blackmail,” he was very economical with intertitles,” he explains. “So when sound appeared he used it to his benefit,” he says, describing a famous scene shown in the documentary, which compares the silent and sound versions.
In it, which takes place the day after the murder, Alice is having breakfast with her family when a neighbor turns up and starts talking about a murder that has happened. When her father asks her to cut a slice of bread, she becomes increasingly agitated, until she finally drops the knife.
In the sound version, the neighbor’s chatter becomes garbled except for the word “knife” which emerges louder and louder, exacerbating Alice’s troubled state, until the young woman drops her knife. In the silent version, the viewer sees the shadow of Alice’s hand crawl across the bread as she picks up the knife, to unsettling effect.
The documentary also notes how Hitchcock faced a unique challenge with his lead actress, Anny Ondra, when filming the sound version of “Blackmail” because of her thick Czech accent which was ill-suited for her role.
Since post-production dubbing was not technically feasible at the time, Hitchcock had to enlist a actress, Joan Barry, to provide Ondra’s dialogue in real time on set. While Ondra performed her scenes, Barry stood off-camera, delivering the lines in sync with the action, marking an inventive solution in the early days of sound cinema.
Becoming.Hitchcock.The.Legacy.Of.Blackmail.2024.1080p.BluRay.x264-HANDJOB.mkv
General
Container: Matroska
Runtime: 1 h 11 min
Size: 5.85 GiB
Video
Codec: x264
Resolution: 1920x1080
Aspect ratio: 16:9
Frame rate: 24.000 fps
Bit rate: 11.0 Mb/s
BPP: 0.221
Audio
#1: English 5.1ch AC-3 @ 640 kb/s
Language(s):English
Subtitles:English, German
