blackmail

Blackmail (1929)

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There’s an awkward transition period between silent and sound pictures, and Alfred Hitchcock’s Blackmail sits right in the middle of it. In fact, it straddles the line between the two. If you look up the film online and click the first streaming link that your search results present, you’ll find yourself watching the film in sound, but this was actually a late-breaking change made well into production. The Kino Lorber DVD release that my library has contains both the silent and the talkie versions of the film, and the silent one was actually more financially successful in its day than the other — largely due to the fact that most British cinemas didn’t have sound technology installed yet, reducing the talkie Blackmail’s overall box office. Blackmail stands at this crux in the leap in film technology, and so we must give it some grace for its issues. 

Flapper Alice White (Anny Ondra) is dating Scotland Yard detective Frank Webber (John Longden), although she finds him a bit of a bore. On the side, she’s also occasionally going on dates with a painter named Crewe (Cyril Ritchard). After an argument at a tea house, Frank storms out, allowing Crewe to offer to take Alice out, and Frank sees the two leaving together. Crewe takes Alice to his artist’s loft and the two flirt for a bit before Alice volunteers to wear a (for the time) racy dancing costume and model for Crewe; he hides her clothes while she’s changing and his personality drastically changes as he attempts to force himself on her. Alice manages to grab a nearby knife and kill Crewe in self-defense, but she goes home in a state of shock. The following day, reminders of Crewe’s death are all around her, and a gossipy neighbor standing about in her father’s newsstand recounting the grisly details doesn’t help. Frank visits the scene of the killing and finds one of Alice’s gloves, pocketing the evidence before anyone else sees it and bringing it to her, where she wants to tell him everything but can’t verbalize the horror of her situation the previous night. Unfortunately, Alice’s exit from Crewe’s building was witnessed by career criminal Tracy (Donald Calthrop), who arrives with Alice’s other glove and announces his intent to extort both Alice and Frank. 

I’m not entirely certain that calling this film a “thriller” accurately reflects the content. The title act of blackmail doesn’t really enter the narrative until quite late in the game, and although the film’s energy picks up in its final act, the first three quarters of its eighty-five-minute runtime is fairly slow-paced. If anything, the film is more of a character study of Alice White than anything else. The film follows her almost entirely and spends a great deal more time on extended examinations of her face as she reacts to things that happen around her. Ondra has the perfect features for this era of filmmaking, with the big eyes and pouty lips that were best suited to convey the outsized emotions that dialogue-free performance required. Her English was so accented, however, that Hitchcock had another actress (Joan Barry) say Alice’s lines off-camera while Ondra lip-synced the dialogue, and the result is a little uncanny. (This was a technological limitation of the time; in Murder!, released the following year, the main character’s internal monologue while listening to the radio was accomplished by having the actor record his lines and then act along to his own voice on the tape, all while a live orchestra played the music that was supposedly playing on his radio.) That slight awkwardness as a result of this method is a little strange, but it unintentionally adds another layer to the performance, as if Alice’s experiences have left her so out of sorts that she’s not entirely in sync with her own mind. 

This is Alice’s story: she’s just a girl wanting to have fun, and she’s bored of her cop boyfriend always taking her to the movies. Crewe, a mysterious artist, shows an interest in her and invites her back to his place, where he shows off his work and even lets Alice express herself on a canvas as well, and it’s all fun and games before he reveals his true intentions. She defends herself but kills him in the process and returns home to wash his blood out of her clothes. On the street, the positions of people at rest remind her too much of the state she left Crewe’s body in, and when she’s trying to have breakfast with her family, she can’t get any peace. Her boyfriend arrives with evidence that she’s been two-timing him and she can’t even speak about the kind of danger that she defended herself from. All of this is before Tracy even enters the picture. This isn’t a thriller, really; it’s a noir, one with an inciting incident that would appear in noirs for decades to come, at least into the fifties with titles like The Blue Gardenia. How much you’re going to be invested in the film depends on how much you like Alice, and although I did, I can see her characterization being a harder pill to swallow for others, even before getting into the strange lip syncing issue that may further turn some viewers off. In the end, Tracy is sought for questioning purely as a matter of having a criminal record and having been in the area, and he flees the police, leading to a chase that winds through the British Museum before he falls from the building’s roof to his death. This leads to Crewe’s death being pinned on Tracy and Alice being free to go, but the film lingers on her face in its final moments in a way that makes it plain that although she may be legally absolved, she’s been forever changed by having to slay a man in order to protect herself from his sexual assault. 

As to the elements that make the film memorable as a Hitchcock text, the final fourth of the film sees Tracy being chased by the police, presaging several images and ideas that would go on to be reliable tricks in the director’s bag. In the British Museum, Tracy descends a rope to escape his pursuers past a giant bust of presumably Egyptian origin. There’s a distinct visual genealogy between this and the finale of North by Northwest: 

The Mount Rushmore sequence is also part of another one of Hitchcock’s trademarks, which was to have the film’s final action scenes lead to a rooftop climax, most famously in Vertigo but also To Catch a Thief, Rear Window, and Foreign Correspondent, just to name a few (although for the last two of these Jimmy Stewart is dangled out of a window rather than off of a rooftop and the fall from Westminster Cathedral tower happens at the beginning of the third act rather than its end, respectively). The chase scene through the museum is also clearly echoed in the protracted sequence that concludes I Confess, although this one is stronger and Hitchcock is already demonstrating his strong eye for composition when it comes to setting up the most interesting version of a shot, sticking the camera in the vertices of an oddly shaped room or taking on an overhead view of a large reading area. He’s also already inserting his sly sense of humor into the proceedings. Despite the relative novelty of the art form, the characters within the film are already talking about movies as if the whole enterprise is old hat; Frank seemingly only wants to go to detective flicks which Alice finds boring and predictable, and Frank admits he’s still excited to see the latest one about Scotland Yard, even if “they’re bound to get most things wrong.” Hitchcock’s lack of respect for the institution of the police overall is on display as well, since the entirety of Scotland Yard does, in fact, get most things wrong; they latch onto Tracy based on circumstantial evidence and chase him to his death, unknowingly doing so in order to cover for a killing (albeit a legally defensible one) committed by the girlfriend of one of their own members. 

It’s all good stuff, but I doubt that Blackmail remains of much interest even to most film-lovers who don’t have an unhealthy interest in Hitchcock’s body of work. Narratively, it’s not in conversation with his other texts, at least not those we think of as the canonical forty thrillers. Insofar as it’s useful as an interpretative tool for his filmography as a whole, this film feels like an attempt at experimenting with techniques and images that he would perfect later and is fascinating in that right, but I once again fear that this fascination extends only to real Hitch-heads. The Lodger is a much more engaging film if you’re interested in what the director’s silent and silent-adjacent work was like, and for experiments with the artform that sound introduced into the medium, Murder! has more fascinating production trivia and smoother tone overall, although I’d go to bat for Blackmail’s value as a noir character study before I’d recommend the 1930 film. This is in the public domain, so hopefully it’s not too hard for you to find if I’ve sold you on it. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

The Forbidden Photos of a Lady Above Suspicion (1970)

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A couple Halloweens ago, I was costumed as a creepy teddy bear and dancing to loud electronic music over cocktails at R Bar.  Being a helpless cinema addict and not on the hunt for a Halloween hookup, I remember fixating on the muted, subtitled giallo that was screening on the walls of R Bar, fascinated.  My body may have been politely gyrating to the DJ’s set, but my mind was racing trying to figure out what gorgeous giallo oddity was providing the party’s background texture, since it was one that I had not yet seen.  Some light googling on All Saint’s Day led me to the typically poetic, overlong giallo title The Forbidden Photos of a Lady Above Suspicion, which soon enough mysteriously appeared on a used DVD at a local thrift store.  Is it the same copy they were spinning at R Bar?  Was I being stalked by a giallo?  What could this vintage Technicolor erotic thriller possibly want from me?  The answer, of course, was nude photographs.

In retrospect, it’s funny that of all the gialli in the world, the above-the-bar selection that Halloween night was Forbidden Photos, since it’s not nearly as pronounced of a Horror Film as some of the more obvious titles from a Bava, or a Fulci, or an Argento.  Director Luciano Ercoli is less of a household name because of that lack of horror fandom support, since this falls closer to the proto-erotic thriller end of the giallo spectrum than the proto-slasher end.  With an atypically focused script from Ernesto Gastaldi and a softly melodramatic score from Ennio Morricone, Forbidden Photos is relatively straightforward and emotional for a giallo – trading in throat slashings from a leather-gloved killer for amateur porno shoots & sadomasochistic acts of blackmail.   It’s stylish, swanky, sadistic and, ultimately, sad, with internal-monologue narration that invests in its female victim’s inner life more than most examples of the genre.

Dagmar Lassander stars as the tormented Minou, played with the sad, glassy eyes and stiff, vaulted wigs of a Cole Escola character.  While her wealthy businessman husband is away on a work trip, she is physically assaulted by a mysterious brute who claims to have evidence that her spouse is a murderer (through the ludicrous method of artificially inducing The Bends in a business rival, then staging their death as a drowning).  Drawn into the stranger’s web, she involuntarily sleeps with him to receive (and destroy) evidence of the murder in trade, then briefly becomes his “sex slave” once he produces photographic evidence of their tryst (i.e., her rape) which he again leverages as blackmail.  Seedy pornography seems to be the criminal’s livelihood, as he appears as a performer himself in illicit photos owned by Minou’s hedonist bisexual friend Dominique (Susan Scott, who steals every scene she’s in).  Only, he may not exist outside of the pornography at all. Minou quickly spirals as the master-slave relationship escalates until her blackmailer suddenly vanishes; she’s then unsure whether she’s being gaslit or losing her grip on reality thanks to her favorite snack & drink combo of cocktails & tranquilizer pills.  That mental breakdown is when the film fully tips into supernatural horror territory, finally justifying its Halloween Night background programming.

In his interview on the 2006 Blue Underground disc I picked up, Gastaldi credits Forbidden Photos‘s unusual sense of clarity & cohesion to Ercoli sticking to the narrative of his screenplay instead of using it as a flimsy excuse for whatever visual indulgence happened to catch the director’s attention that day, as was giallo tradition.  An incredibly prolific writer in his heyday, Gastaldi would know, having written over eighty produced screenplays – including such formidable titles as All the Colors of the Dark, The Whip and the Body, The Vampire and the Ballerina, and Your Vice is a Locked Room and Only I Have the Key.  If you’re looking for the version of Forbidden Photos that takes wild, stylistic swings at the expense of narrative & tonal control, I’d recommend Fulci’s maniacal erotic thriller The Devil’s Honey, which is much looser in its forced S&M plot.  Ercoli is more grounded & restrained in his approach, which means that this is the rare giallo where the reveals behind its central mystery (whether Minou is being blackmailed or experiencing a mental breakdown) actually matter to the audience, as opposed to being treated as a last-minute formality.

That’s not to say that Forbidden Photos is not dripping with classic giallo style.  All of its characters live in sparse, swanky houses, which operate more as minimalist art galleries than traditional homes.  When Minou reunites with her husband after her initial attack, he’s introduced through a pane of shattered glass, sharply calling his honesty & integrity into question.  When she first enters her blackmailer’s apartment, she has to peer into his seedy world through Lynchian red-velvet curtains, like entering a fairy tale realm through a theatre stage.  Her rape in that apartment is only visually represented in flashback, with the more salacious details punctuated by a severe “Chinese devil statue” that the brute keeps on display.  Even more important to the picture is Minou’s genuine sexual tension with Dominique.  Their first hangout together involves the two gal-pals browsing through a mountain of amateur pornography, much of it featuring Dominique herself.  Dominique is such an aspirational antidote to Minou’s torturous lack of confidence that you actively root for her not to be involved with Minou’s potential gaslighting plot, since the story would be much more satisfying if they could manage to stay “friends.”  I will not spoil the way that story turns out, but I think it says a lot that it’s a giallo with a mystery worth leaving unspoiled just as much as it’s worthy of being projected as a stylish Halloween Night mood-setter at a dive-bar dance party.

-Brandon Ledet

4 mosche di veluto grigio (aka Four Flies on Grey Velvet, 1971)

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see no evil

onestar

No matter how you slice it–no pun intended–4 mosche di veluto grigio (Four Flies on Grey Velvet) is a weird, sloppy mess, even for a Dario Argento film. The final part of Argento’s so-called animal trilogy, Flies was released just ten months after The Cat o’ Nine Tails, and the movie follows a horribly unlikable protagonist who is being stalked and harassed by a killer in a mask. Oh, also, the protagonist is a killer. Well, not really. I should explain, and I will try. Be warned: this review is chock full of spoilers, but it will save you the trouble of sitting through this stinker.

As the film opens, a drummer in a standard early seventies rock band, Roberto (Michael Brandon), realizes that he is being followed by a cloaked man. After practice, he follows the man to an abandoned opera house, where an altercation ensues and Robert stabs the man with his own knife. Roberto is then photographed standing over the man’s body with the knife. The following day, he receives the stabbed man’s identification in the mail. Then he and his bandmates have a party! Roberto goes to change a record, and finds a photograph taken during the previous night’s incident between two albums. He remains completely unaffected, either by the fact that he killed someone or that he’s getting the I Know What You Did Last NIGHT treatment. He finally tells his wife, Nina (Mimsy Farmer), what happened after he is nearly strangled in their living room in the middle of the night; she is understandably disturbed, but he mansplains her down. Do you like the main character yet?

Roberto’s maid (Maria Fabbri) places a phone call that reveals she knows who the blackmailer is and wants a piece of the action. She waits to rendezvous with them in a park, but gets locked in and killed after dark. It is then revealed that the man Roberto “killed” is still alive, and he and the blackmailer/killer conspired to make Roberto appear to be a murderer, for no initially apparent reason, although there is an eventual explanation. Is it ever explained how he and the killer know each other, or why he would be amenable to such a thing? Nope! After the maid is found dead, Nina tells Roberto she’s leaving town, like a sensible person would after multiple break-ins and a murder, but Roberto is mildly interested in seeing what happens next. I say “mildly interested,” because, compared to the level of intensity and interest displayed by Sam Dalmas in The Bird with the Crystal Plumage and Carlo Giordani in the aforementioned Cat, he seems to be completely apathetic to the danger to his own life, and only invested in saving his life insofar as hiring a preening, effeminate private eye, who takes the case mostly because he finds Roberto cute.

The private eye, Arrosio (Jean-Pierre Marielle) is one of the film’s saving graces, and a film that followed him solving the crime would have been a much more interesting endeavor than what does end up on screen. Before he is killed in a subway restroom, Arrosio tracks down information about a former mental patient who was considered by the staff to have been a “maniac” but was “completely cured.” At this point in the film, the killer, or the killer’s sex, becomes pretty obvious; the killer’s whispering voice does little to disguise the fact that she is a woman, and the way that the head psychiatrist at the asylum insistently refers to “the patient” in order to avoid using gendered pronouns is stilted and obvious. I guessed this twist so early in the film that I initially assumed it was the maid, before she ended up dead before the end of Act I. You might guess that the killer is Dalia (Francine Racette), Nina’s cousin, especially after she seems to hear the killer’s madness mantra–a man’s voice saying things like “I wanted a boy, not a weakling!” and “I never want to see you cry!” It’s also worth noting that fewer than sixty seconds pass between Nina’s goodbye and Roberto’s seduction of Dalia. What a class act!

Alas, Dalia is herself killed. The police want to run a ridiculous forensic test: using a laser projected through Dalia’s eye to render an image of the last thing she saw before she died. You may remember such a test from Fringe, or even failed Will Smith vehicle Wild, Wild West. It’s completely absurd, and the science is even more dubious than Cat’s XYY gene nonsense, but it’s also the clue that breaks the case and the explanation of the title: Dalia saw four flies in a line. That night, Roberto waits in the dark with a loaded gun and almost shoots Nina when she comes home. As Roberto begs her to leave, he realizes that her giant ugly necklace has a fly in the medallion, and that Dalia’s last vision was of the necklace rocking back and forth. Nina then gives a rant-filled monologue about how her stepfather wanted a son and tried to raise her as one, but put her in an asylum when his beatings failed to turn her into a boy (shocker); by the time she was released, he was already dead, so she sought out someone like him upon whom she could heap all her vengeance, and Roberto fit the bill. She is scared away, jumps in Roberto’s car, and speeds into the back of a large truck, dying instantaneously. End credits.

This is a bad movie. The most compelling imagery in the film occurs in Roberto’s recurring nightmare about being beheaded in a public square, apparently based upon a story he overhears at a party. So much of the plot is frontloaded with absurdity that by the time an explanation is given, you can hardly bring yourself to care. The tone of the film is inconsistent not only with Argento’s other works but within itself as well. There are times when it seems Argento was going for mild comedy, such as the recurring joke about one of Roberto’s neighbors consistently receiving a different neighbor’s misdelivered pornography, or the pranks and jokes of the two recurring homeless men with whom Roberto is friends (for some reason). Intentionally comedic or not, it doesn’t work. That Nina is the killer is apparent from pretty early on, and her motivation is telegraphed with far too many voiceovers and rotating shots of a padded room. Although the mask Nina wears is delightfully creepy, I wish Argento would have saved it for use in a better film. There are some editing choices that seem to be trying to be avantgarde (notably, people disappear from where they were standing in a park, again “for some reason”), but ultimately have no in-story justification. The only thing really novel about Flies is that a female victim, the maid, dies offscreen for once.

Considered by some to be a hard-to-find gem, I cannot in good conscience suggest that you spend your time trying to track down this movie or view it. The 2009 DVD released by MYA Communications restores the two minutes of Nina’s speech that were cut from previous U.S. releases, but I can’t recommend it, either. Although viewers have the option of viewing the film in English or Italian, there are no subtitles on the disc at all, save for the parts of Nina’s speech which were never dubbed into English due to being cut (the restored footage is in the original Italian). Unlike some of Argento’s other films, in which insert shots of printed text were shot in additional languages for easier international release, all onscreen text is in Italian as well, and there aren’t even translations of these in subtitle form either; as a result, the taunting notes that the killer leaves for Roberto are completely meaningless if you, like me, are unfamiliar with Argento’s native tongue.

Overall, I can only suggest skipping this film. If you are a completist like I am, you’ll probably find yourself watching this as part of the Argento oeuvre at some point. Just don’t say I didn’t warn you.

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond