Alfred Hitchcock is my all-time favorite director. Whenever I need some inspiration, all I have to do is re-visit some of his classics, and my imagination and excitement for filmmaking gets brimming. My favorites for the master aren’t unusual by any means–I like Psycho, Rear Window, The Birds, Strangers on a Train, North by Northwest. I also have strong affection for his more melodramatic Rebecca, and an absolute gem of his, which until yesterday remained the oldest of his films that I had seen, is the funny and entertaining The Lady Vanishes.

As much of a fan I am of Hitchcock, there are still at least a dozen of his films that I’ve never seen, most of which he made in Britain before he came out to America in 1940. I’ve seen The Lady Vanishes, and I’ve heard of a couple other ones like The 39 Steps and Sabotage, but for the most part, I wasn’t really aware of his films made between 1925-1939. Many of these films are not available on home video, but I thought it would be time to go back and watch his films in order… films of his I’ve seen… films of his I haven’t seen. and watch, for the first time, his progress over five decades of filmmaking.

Hitchcock’s first film was The Pleasure Garden, considered a strong debut on most parts, but unavailable on DVD. His second film, The Mountain Eagle, is the only Hitchcock movie to be 100% completely lost, without a single copy anywhere to be found (Hitchcock later told Francois Truffaut that he was happy about the film’s disappearance). I took a look at Hitchcock’s third feature, The Lodger, often considered his first “Hitchcockian” movie, but it didn’t leave me with much to get excited about. I found it rather slow and hard to watch, especially considering the crappy DVD transfer I watched of it. In the next three years , Hitchcock would make seven, count them, seven features, the remaining of his silent films. Many of these are unavailable, but Easy Virtue I took a look at, and The Ring I will be looking at in the coming weeks. Easy Virtue is a rather blase Hitchcock movie, aside from a visually stunning opening courtroom scene, in which Hitchcock uses some cute visual gags and tricks. In 1929, Hitchcock would set out to make another silent, but, well into production, the producers decided that this new feature would be one of Britain’s first talkies, and Hitchcock had to re-strategize the production of the film. 1929 was essentially the awkward transition year from silent to sound films, and this would be Hitchcock’s first chance to tell a story through dialogue.

After looking at some of Hitchcock’s films of the 1920’s, I have to say that Blackmail is the first of his films that I truly enjoyed, and the first one that seemed to really show off some Hitchcock flair. The best part of the movie is the first third, in which a woman named Alice ditches her detective husband to spend some time with an interesting artist, who in return brings her back to his flat. They spit a lot of small talk back and forth, he plays the piano for her, and then he takes her to a back room… to have his way with her. She ends up killing him to defend herself, and later, her detecetive husband is assigned to the case to the solve the murder.

After the murder, the movie plays out like a fairly conventional thriller that could’ve been made by many other directors of the time. It’s the first thirty minutes that stand out the most and show Hitchcock at his very best. The pacing and structure leading up the murder is really well done and still works eighty years later as a suspenseful scene. Alice and the artist spend some time together, go up to his apartment, play the piano. If somebody was just flipping through the channels and came to this scene, he or she might think this could be a happy-go-lucky classic Warner Bros musical. This scene may be the first example of Hitchcock really playing the audience like a piano, making them think everything is just with these two characters, and then leading them into some true horror. And brilliantly, the attempted rape is done off-screen behind some curtains. The end of this scene is twisted because Alice, who up until now has been a cute, perky, happy person, walks out from behind a curtain, knife in hand, with a look of menace and madness on her face. Fantastic!

I am going to be looking at more early Hitchcock movies over the next few weeks, including Murder, Number Seventeen, and the 39 Steps, and I’m excited to see more of what he could come up with in his first decade of making movies at such a young age. As someone who looks up to this man in every way, I’m pleased to finally take a look at those remaining films of his I haven’t yet seen and revisit other classics that I haven’t seen in a long, long time. And it’s going to be especially fun to look for all the Hitchcock cameos. Blackmail features what may be his longest.