After the sound footage was matched up with the silent stuff, the finished product had to be manufactured at low budget and top speed to beat any rivals to claim the title of the first British talkie. Still, some purists, and some eyewitnesses, insist that Blackmail really wasn’t the first.
As noted, before Hitchcock, Freddie Young had already shot several “dialogue scenes” in the padded building for a picture called White Cargo. In his memoir Young argued that White Cargo deserved to boast of being “the first sound sequence to be filmed for a British feature.” Another English director, Thomas Bentley, had already completed a “talking” two-reeler called The Man in the Street, and he sniffed in interviews that Blackmail was “only half-sound.” Victor Saville’s Kitty was another film trumpeted by some as the first British talkie, and maybe it was—except that only the last reels “talked” (the rest were scored with music), and the sound sequences were added in New York on an experimental stage owned by RCA.*
Other British talkies might have been shot first, but Hitchcock’s exceptional planning translated into speed and efficiency in postproduction. The filming in the padded building was finished by late May, and the talkie Blackmail was ready for trade screening on June 21.
And there is something else: those rival first talkies have faded into obscurity, while Blackmail remains a milestone—not only a film at the forefront of sound, but a film whose subject and style were ahead of its time in every way. Arguably, it was Hitchcock’s first mastery of suspense.
When the talkie Blackmail had its premiere at select theaters in July 1929, the London film critics were unanimous. The Daily Mail said the new Hitchcock film was “the best talking film yet—and British,” while Kine Weekly described it as “a splendid example of popular all-talkie screen entertainment.” The London reviewer for Variety noted that “silent, it would be an unusually good film; as it is, it comes near to being a landmark.”
Yet Blackmail also existed as a silent film, and the soundless version was quietly released a short time later, drawing bigger crowds at the hundreds of English theaters not yet wired for talkies. In 1993, when the British Film Institute restored the silent version, commissioning a Jonathan Lloyd score to accompany a world tour, contemporary critics got a chance to see the “other” Blackmail. Most agreed that it stood up equally well.
Hitchcock had appeared in The Lodger and Easy Virtue (strolling past a tennis court in the latter), but Blackmail contained his most extended cameo to date. Alice and Frank, in one scene, are riding on the Underground. Among the passengers is the director, intently reading a book. A small boy leans over and jabs Hitchcock’s hat, knocking it down over his eyes. He returns the poke, but cowers as the little nuisance approaches him again. The scene fades. Shot silent, the cameo remained intact and soundless in both versions.
Hitchcock was already a celebrity by the summer of 1929, and he had reason to feel on top of the world. But it was a small world—the world of British film—and he had constant evidence of its fickleness. Late August brought one grim reminder.
With little warning, B.I.P. announced massive layoffs, firing nearly one hundred people, or roughly 20 percent of its personnel. The studio instituted severe budget restrictions and a general policy of retrenchment in production. The shock waves reverberated throughout the industry, and layoffs and cutbacks spread to other studios.
The mood was bitter at Elstree. Although the books continued to show profits, John Maxwell had tied up too much capital in “the round dozen of finished, dialogue, synchronized and silent pictures, at present in cold storage,” in the words of one trade paper; and given the limited number of English venues ready to show them, B.I.P.’s expensive talkies couldn’t make back their investment without conquering foreign markets. The United States continued its immunity to even the best English films, a phenomenon of which Blackmail became a sore example. The first British talkie was rejected outright for distribution in the U. S., according to film historian Paul Rotha, even though it was “infinitely better than any American dialogue picture of the same time.” The reasons given were many and irritating, but the upshot was simple: Americans couldn’t decipher the English accents.
The failure of the Hitchcock talkie in America, and outside of England generally, was counted a “hard blow” to the studio, according to Rotha. “Even the Dominions cold-shouldered” Blackmail, wrote the film historian. “Censorship authorities in Australia at first prevented the picture from being shown,” though the ban was later reversed.
The burgeoning crisis gave Maxwell an excuse to get more personally involved in production decisions. He decreed new belt-tightening measures: Pictures would have to be made cheaper and faster, and now more than ever with English audiences uppermost in mind. Foreign stars simply did not justify their investment.* Costly and adventurous travel would be curtailed in favor of filming on studio stages, which were already figured into the overhead.
At the moment of his first great triumph, therefore, a pall was suddenly cast over Hitchcock’s career. Regardless of whether Blackmail was the first British talkie, the verdict was that he had taken too long and spent too much money to produce the film. America was underwhelmed by his achievement, and censorship hurt prospects in the English territories. There are no reliable box-office figures from that era, but any profits from the film were modest.
It couldn’t have helped his standing at B.I.P. that his budding mystique was creating something of a backlash: already his detractors had formed an “anti-Hitchcock” club. The earliest critics faulted his repetitive visual ideas more than his subject matter. Even in a favorable review of the mild-mannered The Farmer’s Wife, the reviewer for the Bioscope felt compelled to complain that the “magnificent” picture had been undercut by Hitchcock’s tendency toward “fantastic angles of photography.” Even as he praised Blackmail, the London correspondent for Variety grumbled about the director’s growingly familiar “staircase complex.” (“Staircases are very photogenic,” the director defended himself years later, in his interview with Charles Thomas Samuels.)
Although Hitchcock survived the August massacre, John Maxwell put him on notice. He needed to accelerate his productivity, diversify his subject matter, and direct commercially attractive films. Musicals—considered a perfect showcase for talkies—were extremely popular, so England’s most important director was hastily assigned, in late August, to help out with the “all-dialogue, singing and dancing” Harmony Heaven. Hitchcock may have logged a few days on the production, but it couldn’t have been much more.
Harmony Heaven was superseded by the announcement, in October, that Hitchcock had agreed to transfer the Sean O’Casey play Juno and the Paycock to the screen. After that, the director would film another crime story—more in the detective vein—with his adaptation of the Clemence Dane-Helen Simpson novel Enter Sir John.
This surge of activity was enough to satisfy Maxwell, and since the script for Juno and the Paycock was sacrosanct, Hitchcock would have extra time during filming to prepare the screenplay for Enter Sir John. The press had already noticed the director’s inclination to alternate straight theatrical adaptations with more original, “purely cinematic” works, in the words of the Bioscope. Plays were simply easier to film; Hitchcock considered them “breathers” between subjects that involved more originality, expense, and risk.
Sean O’Casey’s Juno and the Paycock was first produced in 1924 at the Abbey Theatre in Dublin; a year later it had opened in London, chalking up over two hundred performances in different runs before touring companies took it to the provinces. Hitchcock had seen it several times. “One of my favorite plays,” he told Peter Bogdanovich.
The acclaimed Juno has often been described as a mixture of low comedy and sublime calamity. The main setting is a poor Dublin tenement, the home of the Boyle family. Captain Boyle is “Paycock,” an arrogant, boozy clown, who takes his self-important seafaring honorific from his onetime stint on the Liverpool-to-Dublin coal run. Juno—named, O’Ca
sey always said, not for the Roman hearth goddess but for the way the character’s life is shaped by events that transpire during the month of June—is Boyle’s wife, and the real head of the family. She is an exalted mother, Mother Ireland incarnate. Juno will endure any indignity for her beloved children. Mary is her sweet, devoted daughter; her son Johnny is a crippled victim of Irish politics, concealing a dark shame.
Captain Boyle is unexpectedly declared heir to a forgotten relative’s bequest. The rise and fall of Boyle’s legacy supplies the semifarce, while the fate of Johnny provides the tragedy. O’Casey had set his play against the backdrop of the 1921 North-South division of Ireland, and the settling of scores between Republicans and Free Staters. Johnny is revealed to have “shopped” a former comrade to his death. Disaster builds when fault is found with the bequest; Mary becomes pregnant and is deserted by her boyfriend (a law clerk handling the will); and militants arrive to exact their revenge on Johnny.
For B.I.P., Juno and the Paycock was a hit play sure to be a hit film. For the director, it was his first opportunity to explore how politics have corrupted history.
A remarkable percentage of Hitchcock films revolve around sabotage, espionage, or assassination. His villains in these stories tended to be ideological fanatics turned traitors or terrorists. Just as Hitchcock had a specific real-life case that haunted him when dealing with “marital murders” (to paraphrase George Orwell), the director’s political films were shadowed by the true story of Reggie Dunn.
Dunn was no “wrong man”—he was a resolute killer, and another notorious criminal the director knew firsthand. During his time at St. Ignatius, Dunn had been one of the most popular, athletic boys at the school. After World War I, however, Dunn grew embittered about the policy of the British government toward Ireland. He joined the IRA and volunteered to become an assassin; he and an IRA comrade shot dead the former chief of the Imperial General Staff, Field Marshal Sir Henry Wilson, in London in 1922—the same year Edith Thompson was alleged to have plotted her husband’s murder. Like Thompson, Dunn was caught and executed. (Unlike her, he proudly admitted his guilt.)
The character of Johnny would be a stand-in for Dunn, and Juno and the Paycock would be the first Hitchcock film to establish the theme that he carried over to later work—of ideological extremism as a spreading stain that distorts idealism and destroys innocents. This was also O’Casey’s theme, and so the director (half Irish, after all, and his own mother a Juno of the Hitchcocks) felt completely in sync with the play—if not the playwright.
Hitchcock had occasion more than once to pay his respects to Sean O’Casey, who was a self-declared exile from Ireland after a bust-up with the Abbey Theatre, and then living at Woronzow Road, St. John’s Wood.
A fiercely dogmatic man of the theater, O’Casey thought film was inferior entertainment. Even the best pictures offered “the glorification of insignificance,” he felt, while the worst—well, the worst were nothing but “lurid ornamentation on a great big scab.” But Adrian Brunel and Ivor Montagu, two of the more “intelligent fanatics for the movies,” in O’Casey’s words, had pursued the playwright with film-writing offers, and one day managed to lure him over to Elstree, where he first met Hitchcock. John Russell Taylor said this meeting transpired on the set of Blackmail, but according to O’Casey’s recollection it must have occurred almost a year earlier, during filming of the more frivolous Champagne.
“There was hot haste and sonorous solemnity everywhere in the place,” O’Casey recalled. “Producer, actor, actress, artisan and their allies behaved as if they were gods creating a newer world. Great doors opened onto wide, imposing steps leading down to an imposing room where a crowd of grandees appeared to be enjoying a sumptuous meal. Down these steps came Betty Balfour, escorted by a beau to the sound of drum and trumpet. This was repeated whenever the left foot of Betty Balfour was lifted too soon, or the right one came down too late. Hundreds of pounds were being spent to bring a Betty Balfour nicely down a flight of steps. I had had enough for the day. It was all furious and false.”
The “furious and false” Champagne held little promise for any meaningful collaboration with Hitchcock on Juno and the Paycock, but the director and playwright met on several occasions, and initially seemed to get along. Important playwrights had contract clauses that stipulated a faithful rendering of their text, but O’Casey was prodded to write a brief new lead-in for the film, which took place in a bar following a riot and gunplay. The new scene would help open up what had been a single-set play—and give Hitchcock an opportunity for a bartender cameo.*
Urged by Brunel and Montagu, O’Casey even thought about writing an original script for Hitchcock. He began to formulate a story he tentatively called “The Green Gates,” a broad canvas about daily life inside Hyde Park in central London—“the emotion of the living characters to be projected against their own patterns and the patterns of the park,” in the words of O’Casey biographer Garry O’Connor. “It was to begin at dawn with the opening of the gates,” as O’Casey put it, “and end at midnight as they closed again, to the twelve chimes of Big Ben striking softly in the distance.”
It was exactly the sort of slice-of-life drama, digressive and widely revealing of humanity, that Hitchcock always dreamed of filming. So he and Alma (who was adapting Juno and the Paycock—it would be her first formal script credit on a Hitchcock film) came to dinner at Woronzow Road. The O’Caseys put on the ritz, bringing out their finest dinnerware and tablecloth, “one kept for state occasions,” according to O’Casey, “for Sean and Eileen [his wife] had secret visions that this coming talk might bring money worries to an end.”*
The playwright’s recollection of this summit meeting was poisoned by his disappointment in what followed. “Hitchcock was a hulk of a man, unwieldy in his gait, seeming as if he had to hoist himself into every movement, like an overblown seal, sidling from place to place, as if the hard earth beneath couldn’t give him a grip,” O’Casey wrote later. “Seated at table, though quiet in his movements, he seemed to be continually expanding, while Mrs. Hitchcock seemed to contract, a stilly mind sitting silent but attentive, registering every gesture and every word. His sober lounge suit, straining at the buttons, seemed to want to let itself go, while her gayer dress seemed to tighten round her body, imprisoning the impressions her mind formed from the experimental talk of the evening.
“Hitchcock liked all the suggestions made by Sean,” his account continues, “but Sean noticed that his wife kept a dead silence, merely answering quietly an odd question or two put to her by Eileen. Hitchcock blazed up about the power of the camera—it could take into itself all in heaven, on the earth, and in the sea under the earth; there was nothing beyond its scooping eye. But Sean felt that the camera could do very little. Keep moving was its cry, like a parrot-policeman. It could not pause to take a breath as the stage did.”
After an evening of “experimental talk” about the Hyde Park subject, the film director departed “bubbling with excitement,” leaving behind “a hearty invitation to come to dinner some day the following week, of which Mrs. Hitchcock would let them know.”
But Mrs. Hitchcock never called back, and her husband never followed up on “The Green Gates.” O’Casey, who later converted “The Green Gates” into a play, acidly ascribed the Hitchcocks’ silence to the veto power of the director’s “smiling and silent” wife.
Did Hitchcock, after leaving Woronzow Road, realize he couldn’t possibly hope to make “The Green Gates” at such a time of constraint at the studio? Was the bubbling just polite table talk? Or did Alma warn her husband off a man so pigheaded against film?
The cast of Juno and the Paycock was a mix of contract players and names familiar from the stage productions. As Juno, Hitchcock cast the original Dublin actress, Sara Allgood (she was also a veteran of Blackmail); for Joxer, the wastrel in cahoots with Captain Boyle, he also obtained the prototype, ex-Irish Player Sidney Morgan. Perhaps because O’Casey was perpetually at odds with B
arry Fitzgerald, the original Paycock, Hitchcock stayed away from the actor, who would later become a quintessential Irishman in many Hollywood films. Instead he gave Fitzgerald a vignette as a street orator, glimpsed in O’Casey’s new opening scene.
For his Captain Boyle, Hitchcock tried to get Arthur Sinclair, who had ably portrayed the Paycock in London, but Sinclair was under contract to tour in the play. So he bestowed the lead on Edward Chapman, a York-shireman from the stage who would be making his screen debut. John Longden was the law clerk who seduces Mary Boyle (Kathleen O’Regan). A Scotsman, John Laurie, rounded out the cast as the ill-fated Johnny.
Most of the action would take place on the one-room set that was replicated from the stage production, allowing the director to shoot swiftly and inexpensively in November and December 1929. Being faithful to stage plays, and not exceeding his strict budgets, Hitchcock learned to embrace cramped sets—and to be stimulated by them.
In one scene, the Boyle family is talking things out; a recording can be heard in the background, and a funeral procession is wending by outdoors, when the rat-a-tat of machine-gun fire interrupts. Hitchcock had an idea: he wanted to try capturing it all in one fluid camera movement—incorporating all the dialogue and sound effects in a single long take with no cuts. Because of the still-primitive technology, all the speech and music and incidental noises had to be recorded simultaneously, while remaining somehow distinct and intelligible.
Alfred Hitchcock Page 18