Early Hitchcock

Crime and Punishment

In Hitchcock’s cinema no-one can truly be said to be innocent. Some will receive punishment for their crimes, while some are punished for the crimes of others. Some can escape without any punishment at all. Guilt is transferable and the punishment awarded is not necessarily appropriate. All are guilty but not all are necessarily punished.

In Blackmail all the major characters are guilty in some sense, but the punishment they receive is not necessarily appropriate to their crimes. Crewe, the artist, is guilty of lasciviousness, of manipulation and a possible attempted rape, he is punished by death, as is Tracy whose crime was blackmail. Frank, the detective, is a corrupt policeman and had a considerable blame in the death of Tracy, as well as his dubious domination of Alice, our heroine. Robin Wood, in his book Hitchcock’s Films Revisited says ‘The film makes it clear that Crewe’s ‘dishonourable’ intentions are really no more oppressive than Frank’s ‘honourable’ ones’. But, somehow, Frank emerges as the hero of the piece.

And what of Alice? She is a murderess who escapes the grips of the law through the intervention of her corrupt policeman boyfriend.

Blackmail was based on a play by Charles Bennett but Hitchcock rewrote the ending. In the Bennett version the police pursue Alice, find her with Frank and assume he is arresting her, Alice is convicted and imprisoned in symmetry with the opening sequence. The film ends on an ironic note with a colleague asking Frank if he was going out with his girlfriend that evening, he replies ‘Not tonight’. It may be that a ‘happy’ ending was substituted to make it more commercial. Maurice Yacowar, author of Hitchcock’s British Films, says it was a more likely case that the producers wouldn’t allow the original ending. Eric Rohmer and Claude Chabrol, in Hitchcock: the first forty-four films attribute the change to Hitchcock’s personal preference rather than commercial pressures. Personally I agree with Rohmer-Chabrol as the rewritten ending is more typically Hitchcock; compare it for example with the ending of Sabotage. In Hitchcock’s ending Alice has theoretically got away with murder. But has she? The film shows Alice suffering the torment of her guilt. In one scene she hears nothing but the word ‘knife’ during a dinner-table conversation, her mind has been twisted by what she has done. She doesn’t receive a punishment by law but does suffer a ‘moral’ punishment of sorts.