Blackmail (Hitchcock, 1929): BFI Southbank NFT1 Silent version, 6.30pm; Sound version, 8.45pm
Tonight is the opening at BFI Southbank of one of the most anticipated film seasons in London for many years: the Genius of Hitchcock. It's a major celebration of the most influential and iconic British film director of all time from now until October which includes all his existing films. You have a choice tonight of whether to see the sound or the silent version of Blackmail.
Chicago Reader review:
'Alfred Hitchcock's 1929 masterpiece, his last silent, follows the plight
of a murderer caught between her blackmailer and her detective
boyfriend. For all the experimental interest of the sound version that
followed (the first full-length talkie released in England), this is
more fluid and accomplished. Apart from two suspenseful set pieces—an
attempted date rape in an artist's studio that ends with the murder of
the artist-rapist, and a chase through the British Museum, Hitchcock's
first giddy desecration of a national monument—what most impresses is
the masterful movement back and forth between subjective and objective
modes of storytelling, as well as the pungent uses of diverse London
settings. As someone who's always preferred Lang's treatment of serial
killers to Hitchcock's, I would opt for this thriller over the much
better known The Lodger as Hitchcock's best silent picture, rivaled only by his less characteristic but formally inventive The Ring.' Jonathan Rosenbaum
Here is an extract from the silent version.
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