Blackmail

This was Hitchcock's last silent film but it was also his first talkie. He shot it as both.

It played at the annual Alloy Orchestra performance at Prospect Park. When the schedule is announced in the spring, the first thing I do is check the date for this event and hope that I'm actually in town. Every year, it is a different film and it is always a great experience - other than the incredibly uncomfortable chairs but I suppose you can't have everything.

I'd never seen one of Hitchcock's silent films before. I wonder if they are all as good as this one. The film is about a woman who wants to cheat on her detective boyfriend with a bad boy who ends up trying to rape her in his art studio. For 1929, I was surprised how suggestive the scene was. She ends up killing him with a knife but she accidentally leaves her gloves at the scene of the crime.

Her detective boyfriend finds the gloves but decides to protect her. However, there's a crook who witnessed the whole thing and now wants to blackmail the woman.

The Hitchcock humor is in full effect in this movie - I loved the many cuts to the creepy clown painting that the murdered artist left behind. And the chase scene at the British Museum reminded me of some of the later stunts he'd pull off later like the one at Mt. Rushmore in North by Northwest, even though that one wasn't really shot at Mt. Rushmore but you see what I'm getting at.

Directed by Alfred Hitchcock
1929
Prospect Park Bandshell