things that cannot be said
by Douglas Messerli
Alfred Hitchcock and Ben W. Levy (adaptation and
dialogue, based on a play by Charles Bennett),
Alfred Hitchcock (director) Blackmail / 1929
Although he was certainly fascinated with the macabre,
with sinister characters out to rob, maim, and kill their victims, and was
highly suspicious of most institutions, local, federal, and international, one
might easily argue that Alfred Hitchcock was one of the most morally
predictable directors in Hollywood. If innocents in his film are often accused
and tortured for wrongs they did not commit, and villains come close to going
scot-free, in the end moral order is restored: the truth is not only revealed
but it prevails, even if harm and danger has changed those wrongly suspected
and accused. If his heroes suffer, they almost always are redeemed. Even the
lovely heroine of Dial M for Murder
is saved the gallows at the very last moment by the bumbling police inspector.
On the other hand, the alluring heroine of Vertigo
must die because of her involvement in a murder. Perhaps only the murder of the
escaping secretary of Psycho seems unjust—although,
we must admit that, having robbed her boss, she is not a true innocent. And
even if it though first appears that an entire community has unintentionally
conspired to do in Harry in Hitchcock’s The
Trouble with Harry, the doctor later confirms that the real cause of death
as a heart attack, and Harry’s death brings that community together in ways
that redeem nearly everyone’s lives. We never meet the innocent strangled in Rope, but the murderers are finally
brought to justice. There are no instances that I can immediately think of in
mature Hitchcock works where the villain completely escapes punishment.
For, Alice
has murdered only to protect herself, and the man she stabs, Mr. Crewe (Cyril
Ritchard)—a sleazy effete artist—is attempting to rape her. So perhaps she
might never have been brought to trial. Yet she and Frank attempt to cover up
the truth. Even here Hitchcock redeems her, in part, by having her, of her own
free will, visit Scotland Yard in order to confess, and that act presumably
reveals her moral fiber. But the fact remains that she has caused the deaths
of, now, two men, and justice has not never served.
The problem
with the world of Blackmail is one of
expression, or, rather, the lack of it. Although many unpleasant things are
talked about, particularly by the endless gossip the visiting neighbor (Phyllis
Konstam) who is quite willing to talk about murder and knives, many more
important things cannot and do not get said. In part, the problem is that the
film was first to have been a silent film, but Hitchcock, recognizing the
potentialities of the new “talkie” version of filmmaking, shot the film as both
a silent film and a talkie.
The first
scene, with only accompanying music, wherein the police, getting a lead, race
to arrest a hiding criminal, explains very little about his guilt, showing only
that he must be guilty since he has a
gun laying nearby and is picked out by a woman in a line-up. Soon after, we see
the detectives, washing up in the Scotland Yard bathroom, participating in
their own kind of petty gossips, one of their kind complaining that his tailor
was so bad that he has never picked up the fabric he purchased in an attempt to
refuse to pay the tailor.
Alice is
fuming in a outer office because Frank has been late, and as they walk to a
nearby tea house they are mostly silent, she still angry for his lateness. At
the tearoom they are hardly able to find a table, and when they do it is nearly
impossible to get the attentions of the waitress. Alice, we quickly perceive,
has other reasons why she is angry with her boyfriend, including the fact that
she has apparently flirted with another man, making an appointment with him in
that very room. And she soon lies to Frank, skipping out on their planned movie
date to meet up with the man, the artist Crewe.
Frank,
miffed, storms out in anger, but once out of the teahouse he has a change of
heart, and seems determined to return his lover. Before he can take action,
however, she reappears with Crewe, and he perceives that she is “cheating” on
him.
Although
Crewe presents the aura of being a successful artist, his art, obviously filled
with operatic and balletic images, is kitsch and artsy in uninteresting ways,
his most recent painting representing a kind of brutish Pagliacci, for whom the
later blackmailer Tracy has apparently been the model. Indeed, there are
hints—nothing gets openly said—that Crewe himself is being blackmailed or least
pestered for money by his former model. We never find out why Tracy is
bothering the artist and, apparently, even stalking him, but we certainly
suspect some nefarious relationship, perhaps even of a homosexual nature.
Again, Hitchcock and his characters seem unable to speak out in this film,
being torn, it appears, between speaking and silence.
Tracy
approaches the two, having discovered Alice’s other glove, with such a
oiliness— hardly daring to speak the word blackmail—that the terrified couple
are forced to even serve him breakfast at Alice’s parents table. And throughout
the long scene where he finally makes his demands known and a deal is struck,
their conversation is constantly interrupted. Words are separated from
sentences, with other words introduced without context. Meaning is attenuated.
In this
film in which characters cannot speak their minds, it is highly ironic that
Tracey escapes into The British Museum, the bastion of images, objects, and
documents that detail the history of the world. That he slips into the dome
itself, falling to his death in the very center of this bastion to knowledge,
without even quite knowing why he is on the run, speaks volumes—but once again
keeps the truth in abeyance.
When Alice
does attempt to admit her crime, no one will let her speak; and when she
finally admits her actions to Frank, himself, she still cannot bring herself to
even say the words “He tried to rape me,” explaining that Crewe was attempting
to do something terrible to her.
The
Pagliacci painting, finally, becomes a emblem of not only Frank’s having been
nearly cuckooed, but of Alice’s guilt in the entire affair—something,
evidently, that provokes, like the sad clown himself, only laughter. It is the
painting, not language, that gets the final say in this portrait of a world
that cannot speak of so many things.
Los Angeles, June 15, 2015
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