Early Hitchcock

The Aberrant Woman

Alice, in Blackmail, is regarded as the first of Hitchcock’s aberrant women, an idea more famously explored in later films such as Psycho(1960), Under Capricorn(1949) and The Birds(1963). Sylvia in Sabotage also fits into this mould.

Alice is a fickle character. She becomes involved with Crewe, the artist, after having a trivial argument with her boyfriend Frank and then flirting with Crewe as a form of revenge or rebellion. David Sterritt, author of The Films of Alfred Hitchcock implies in his book that Alice’s trivial and fickle character is a product of Hitchcock’s misogyny. Certainly it is implied that Alice’s sexuality is the catalytic element that disturbs the status quo, both Frank and Crewe are motivated in the film by the influence of Alice’s sexuality. Robin Wood describes it in his book Hitchcock’s Films Revisited, ‘Frank wants to control and contain it, Crewe to exploit it’.

But in Hitchcock’s films where there’s sex, violence will inevitably follow. Sexuality and violence are intrinsically linked, a woman’s sexuality, and the effect it has on the male, usually leads unavoidably to a violent denouement. This is the case in both Sabotage and Blackmail, as it is in practically all of Hitchcock’s films.