things that cannot be said
by Douglas
Messerli
Alfred
Hitchcock and Ben W. Levy (screenplay, based on a play by Charles Bennett),
Alfred Hitchcock (director) Blackmail /
1929
Although he
was certainly fascinated with the macabre, with sinister characters out to rob,
maim, and kill their victims, and was highly suspicious of most institutions,
local, federal, and international, one might easily argue that Alfred Hitchcock
was one of the most morally predictable directors in Hollywood. If innocents in
his film are often accused and tortured for wrongs they did not commit, and
villains come close to going scot-free, in the end moral order is restored: the
truth is not only revealed but it prevails, even if harm and danger has changed
those wrongly suspected and accused. If his heroes suffer, they almost always
are redeemed. Even the lovely heroine of Dial
M for Murder is saved from the gallows at the very last moment by the
bumbling police inspector. On the other hand, the alluring heroine of Vertigo must die because of her
involvement in a murder. Perhaps only the murder of the escaping secretary of Psycho seems unjust—although, we must
admit that, having robbed her boss, she is not a true innocent. And even though
it first appears that an entire community has unintentionally conspired to do
in Harry in Hitchcock’s The Trouble with
Harry, the doctor later confirms that the real cause of death as a heart
attack, and, more importantly, Harry’s death brings that community together in
ways that redeem nearly everyone’s lives. We never meet the innocent strangled
in Rope, but the murderers are
finally brought to justice. There are no instances that I can immediately think
of in mature Hitchcock works where the villain completely escapes punishment.
For Alice has murdered only to protect herself, and the man she stabs, Mr. Crewe (Cyril Ritchard)—a sleazy effete artist—is attempting to rape her. So perhaps she might never have been brought to trial. Yet she and Frank attempt to cover up the truth. Even here Hitchcock redeems her, in part, by having her, of her own free will, visit Scotland Yard in order to confess, and that act presumably reveals her moral fiber. But the fact remains that she has caused the deaths of, now, two men, and justice has not never served.
The problem with the world of Blackmail is one of expression, or,
rather, the lack of it. Although many unpleasant things are talked about,
particularly by the endless gossip the visiting neighbor (Phyllis Konstam) who
is quite willing to talk about murder and knives, many more important things
cannot and do not get said. In part, the problem is that the film was first to
have been a silent film, but Hitchcock, recognizing the potentialities of the
new “talkie” version of filmmaking, shot the film as both a silent film and a
talkie.
The first scene, with only accompanying
music, wherein the police, getting a lead, race to arrest a hiding criminal,
explains very little about his guilt, showing only that he must be guilty since he has a gun laying nearby and is picked out
by a woman in a line-up. Soon after, we see the detectives, washing up in the
Scotland Yard bathroom, participating in their own kind of petty gossip, one of
their kind complaining that his tailor was so bad that he has never picked up
the fabric he purchased in an attempt to refuse to pay the tailor.
Alice is fuming in an outer office
because Frank has been late, and as they walk to a nearby teahouse they are
mostly silent, she still angry for his lateness. At the tearoom they are hardly
able to find a table, and when they do it is nearly impossible to get the
attentions of the waitress. Alice, we quickly perceive, has other reasons why
she is angry with her boyfriend, including the fact that she has apparently
flirted with another man, making an appointment with him in that very room. And
she soon lies to Frank, skipping out on their planned movie date to meet up
with the man, the artist Crewe.
In short, everyone seems to be keeping
secrets from each other, refusing to speak out and discuss their desires and
priorities. Although Alice clearly thinks of herself as a modern, free-thinking
woman (Crewe even teases her about her attitude by singing “Miss-Up-to-Date”),
she is still a relative neophyte in the sexual world, an innocent who accepts
Crewe’s invitation to see his studio more as a dare than as a tacit approval of
his later sexual nuances. Naively, she even allows him to undress her, so that
she might pose for him in the guise of a ballerina.
Although Crewe presents the aura of being
a successful artist, his art, obviously filled with operatic and balletic
images, is kitsch and artsy in uninteresting ways, his most recent painting
representing a kind of brutish Pagliacci, for whom the later blackmailer Tracy
has apparently been the model. Indeed, there are hints—nothing gets openly
said—that Crewe himself is being blackmailed or least pestered for money by his
former model. We never find out why Tracy is bothering the artist and,
apparently, even stalking him, but we certainly suspect some nefarious
relationship, perhaps even of a homosexual nature. Again, Hitchcock and his
characters seem unable to speak out in this film, being torn, it appears,
between speaking and silence.
Once the crime is committed, Alice enters
what might almost be described as a state of distraction, and she is virtually
unable, even to speak, let alone explain the situation to herself or anyone
else. Is it any wonder that Alice becomes fixated on one word only,
“knife?”
Tracy approaches the two, having
discovered Alice’s other glove, with such an oiliness— hardly daring to speak
the word blackmail—that the terrified couple are forced to even serve him
breakfast at Alice’s parents’ table. And throughout the long scene where he
finally makes his demands known and a deal is struck, their conversation is
constantly interrupted. Words are
Even after Frank hears from his superiors
that the blackmailer has suddenly become a suspect in the murder, we are still
uncertain whether he is attempting to frighten Tracey away from any further
blackmail or speaking the truth as he supposedly awaits the police van to
arrest the vagabond.
In this film in which characters cannot
speak their minds, it is highly ironic that Tracey escapes into The British
Museum, the bastion of images, objects, and documents that detail the history
of the world. That he slips into the dome itself, falling to his death in the
very center of this bastion to knowledge, without even quite knowing why he is
on the run, speaks volumes—but once again keeps the truth in abeyance.
When Alice does attempt to admit her
crime, no one will let her speak; and when she finally admits her actions to
Frank, himself, she still cannot bring herself to even say the words “He tried
to rape me,” explaining that Crewe was attempting to do something terrible to
her.
The Pagliacci painting, finally, becomes
an emblem of not only Frank’s having been nearly cuckooed, but of Alice’s guilt
in the entire affair—something, evidently, that provokes, like the sad clown
himself, only laughter. It is the painting, not language, that gets the final
say in this portrait of a world that cannot speak of so many things.
Los Angeles, June 15, 2015
Reprinted
from World Cinema Review (June 2015).
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