Hitchcock’s silent Blackmail is one of, if not the best British films of the late 20s. Made in 1929, during the transition to the sound picture the film was commissioned as a silent film and a part talkie with music and some dialogue scenes.
Margaret Kennedy in her article The Mechanical Muse says of thisdifficult innovation for filmmakers: “Science was offering a wonderful baby, a Midas, an infant Hercules, to anyone who could improvise a cradle large enough to hold it. None of the Arts felt inclined to accept responsibility. The showmen, the purveyors of entertainment were ready enough to accept paternity and pay for its keep but they could not cradle it. Nor could they purvey something which did not as yet exist. The tool only existed. Nobody knew how it should be cherished, nurtured and fed… Caveman, shepherd and peasant – each had his own rough, primitive idea of what a satisfactory drawing or tune or play should be. As much could not be said of the first fabricators of sound films. They had no notion of what they wanted to make. Nor had the public much notion of what it wanted to see and hear. The artist and audience were equally at a loss.”
Enter young (ish) Alfred Hitchcock, who managed to simultaneously produce a beautifully crafted silent film and a sound version which tackled the considerable technical obstacles of adding dialogue with such an imaginative and intelligent approach that the film has become famous for this aspect of its composition to the exclusion of an appreciation of its quality as a film. Many people are not aware of the silent version at all despite the fact that it is superior to the sound version in several ways.
As Hitchcock said himself “The silent pictures were the purest form of cinema” and indeed the silent film contains more shots, more camera movement and through the fluidity of the cutting conveys the narrative with greater style. Every scene counts and every shot either enhances the atmosphere or moves the story along. The story itself is deceptively simple – a lively young girl engaged to a rather stuffy policeman boyfriend is enticed up to an artist’s studio and there stabs him to death to avoid rape. The consequences play out with mounting tension in more or less real time until Hitchcock sets up the first of the set-piece chases– in this case over the iconic dome of the British Museum – that would become his trademark.
The account of the restoration of Blackmail is one of the dullest in film archiving history. No tales of nitrate fire peril or archival derringdo. The original negative first came to the BFI in 1959 – thanks to a cordial relationship between the producing company and Ernest Lindgren, then curator of the Archive. British International could so easily have junked the silent version when the final cinemas were converted for sound in 1930, but they didn’t. The negative was duplicated immediately on acquisition into the archive to create pre-servation and printing masters affording no opportunity for scenes to be lost or deterioration to set in. A new dupe was made in the 1990s from which this print has been struck. It looked pretty good in ’29 and ’59, it looks just as lovely now. I can’t help feeling the über-efficient Mr Hitchcock would have approved.
Bryony Dixon, BFI National Archive

Scoring for Hitch
I believe that there is such a thing as a ‘Hitchcock score’, for all the fact that Hitch worked with numerous composers during his sound career. It’s a score heavily weighted towards the tonality of Bernard Herrmann and Miklós Rózsa, a textbook compendium of tension and thrill motifs which soars romantically in the love scenes with just a hint of warning that there may be no happy ending. This is the tool-box I raided when I embarked on this score for Blackmail and I have enjoyed it more than any work I have ever done before. This is due to many factors – Timothy Brock is the collaborator of my dreams and a great part of any success this score may have is due to his extraordinary musicianship and enthusiasm. I have never scored a film for full symphony orchestra before and if the challenges were daunting, the opportunities were dazzling. The silent Blackmail is, for me, the greatest British silent film, a mature and adult drama and a more rewarding experience than its sound counterpart – understandably since Hitch was, by 1929, a master of the techniques of silent cinema. Sound made him a pioneer, albeit a hugely gifted one, in the new medium of hissing soundtracks and cut-glass accents. Blackmail is, moreover, a great British work of art in any medium, the most alluring and fearsome aspect of all in my attempting to score it.
The film is drenched in the character of London, my home town, and its peculiarly British (specifically English) attitudes, few of them particularly wholesome, all character quirks I grew up with and recognise. Hitch himself is an amalgam of a good Catholic’s attitude to sin (guilt and retribution) and a good Londoner’s attitude to crime (quiet fascination with those who effortlessly practise it and outright delight at those who stylishly get away with it) and Blackmail was, at this point in his career, his most definitive statement of his own character. He makes his musical requirements very obvious from beyond the grave, through masterly direction of the action. Like Hitch, I fell in love with Anny Ondra and tried to make the music complicit in her seduction (it’s that beautiful dress that gets her into trouble – in my score when she wears it she becomes Cinderella unaware she is about to be raped by Prince Charming) and I also tried to mirror Hitch’s love of London and its people, with the exception of its policemen.
For the first time in my life I have been in the same privileged position as my composition heroes – working with the best director in the business towards a classic romantic orchestral score in the old tradition, where tonalities seldom enter pure major or minor keys but lurch between the two, matching the characters’ flailing (and all too human) moral choices. As Blackmail delights in the grey areas of human behaviour, the score attempts to be equally alluring shades of grey. The music came with much hard work but great delight – mainly because of Maestro Brock’s care, patience and energy but also because of the giants on whose shoulders I was standing. Hitch, Herrmann, Rozsa and Waxman had done it all before and I had been listening to them all my life.
I am enormously grateful to the festival for giving me this wonderful opportunity in my 50th year and, coincidentally, for making Blackmail the first British silent drama to be newly scored for full orchestra since the advent of sound.
Neil Brand