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A swarm of sailboats fills the screen in the introductory view of the Isle of Man, a bedrock for Flaherty and Powell. The triangle is nimbly laid out, the boisterous fisherman (Carl Brisson) and the ambitious lawyer (Malcolm Keen), close as brothers and in love with the tawny barmaid (Anny Ondra), the "Manx Fairy," Met with the fisherman's marriage proposal, the girl is framed by a window with the revolving beam of a distant lighthouse slashing in and out of the surrounding darkness, the vacillating mind visualized. (The expressionistic glow reappears toward the end as the heroine wanders the edge of a pier, lost in suicidal thought.) While Brisson is abroad making his fortune, she falls in love with Keen (notes on a diary chronicle the progression of the courtship, a Godardian use of words as images). The fisherman is presumed dead only to return "hearty and flush o' money" to a guilty chum and a pregnant sweetheart. "The mills of God grind slowly," intones the stern old innkeeper at the wedding party, as Alfred Hitchcock sends up the purity of marriage ("a mighty reverent thing") with a string of dissolves culminating in a frontal composition of clueless groom, miserable bride and shamefaced best friend, all three separated by a double-layer cake. It builds to the tribunal encounter between the judge and the woman he's deserted (cf. Dreyer's The President), and an ending that gazes ahead to Under Capricorn. Hitchcock's last silent is a sonata of POV close-ups, Blackmail hangs on to Ondra and adds a most essential sound, the scream. With Randle Ayrton, Clare Greet, and Kim Peacock. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |