Blackmail

Blackmail is a British crime thriller set in London in 1929. A Scotland Yard detective named Frank Webber is absorbed in his work and pays little attention to his girlfriend, Alice White. Feeling neglected, Alice accepts the company of a charming artist, who invites her back to his flat. Their evening together sets the story's central conflict in motion, drawing Alice into a situation that her detective boyfriend becomes professionally involved in. The film was directed by Alfred Hitchcock from a screenplay he wrote with Michael Powell, and produced by John Maxwell for British International Pictures. It is the fourth of the forty-three films Hitchcock directed, following Champagne in 1928 and preceding Murder! in 1930.

The cast is led by Anny Ondra as Alice, with John Longden as Frank Webber, Cyril Ritchard as the artist, Donald Calthrop as Tracy, and Sara Allgood and Charles Paton as Alice's parents. Roughly a decade before his most famous work, Hitchcock here works at the transition between silent and sound cinema, and the film is often noted as an early landmark of British sound filmmaking. Its eighty-six-minute running time keeps the focus on a small group of characters and an escalating pressure that became characteristic of the director's thrillers.

Critical standing is notably stronger than general audience response. A film critics' rating of 8 out of 10 from twenty-four reviews sits well above the viewer averages of 6.9 on IMDb from about thirteen thousand votes and 6.5 on TMDB from a much smaller sample. The film remains a widely examined early entry in Hitchcock's body of work, watched far more for its historical position than for popular approval.