"Blackmail" is a Minor, Formative Work of Hitchcock

Alfred Hitchcock's Blackmail is a formative film. Made in 1929 as his first sound film (initially filmed as a silent film and converted into a sound one after the fact), Hitchcock had only made a handful of film's prior and, though it's a pretty good, at times shaky, movie, it doesn't have the competency, rigor or fullness of Hitchcock's later works. There's still lots of interesting ideas floating around, a surprisingly dark grey area of moral standards and behavior, and, not all that unexpectedly, a good deal of well-crafted suspense and tension. If it were just an interesting work to see to understand Hitchcock's evolution as a filmmaker that might make it enough to write it off but there's a fairly compelling story of a woman who kills a man she's having an affair with in self-defense and while being torn apart about it, she and her husband, a detective, soon find themselves blackmailed by a man who's put the pieces together about the incident. She and her husband try to stay afoot of the police while the man makes demand after demand. It's dated at times to its detriment but the film is still entertaining. 

Grade: A-