Blackmail [1929]

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• In one key shot, the villain Cyril Ritchard is photographed with a thick shadow (caused by the arm of an overhead chandelier) across his upper lip. Hitchcock wanted the image to evoke the old-fashioned, heavily mustached villain found in many silent films. He later called this touch "my farewell to silent pictures".
• As Tracy (Donald Calthrop) sits eating some food which he has just gained in a first minor act of blackmail, he sits humming the tune The Best Things in Life are Free.
• Much of the film was originally shot silent; when sound became available during the course of shooting, director Alfred Hitchcock re-shot certain scenes with sound, thus making it the Master of Suspense's first talkie. There was one complication with this change, however. Leading lady Anny Ondra had a thick German accent which was inappropriate to her character, Alice White. Joan Barry was chosen to provide a different voice for her, but post-production dubbing technology did not exist then. The solution was for Barry to stand just out of shot and read Alice's lines into a microphone as Ondry mouthed them in front of the camera. This is generally acknowledged as the first instance of one actor's voice being dubbed by another, even though the word "dub" is technologically inappropriate in this case.
• Alfred Hitchcock filmed the silent version with Sam Livesey as the Chief Inspector, but when filming the sound version replaced Livesey with Harvey Braban.
• Director Cameo: Alfred Hitchcock being bothered by a small boy on the underground.
• Generally acknowledged as the first British talkie, and definitely the first sound-on-film British talkie. The Clue of the New Pin, was released in March 1929 in the British Phototone system, a sound-on-disc system using 12-inch phonograph records synchronized with the film.
• The light levels in the British Museum were insufficient to allow Hitchcock to film the final chase scene in the museum. Without informing the producer, Alfred Hitchcock used the Schufftan process (developed by German cinematographer ^[?] Eugen Schüfftan). This involved taking still photos of the interior of the museum, then reflecting the photos in a mirror with certain parts of the silvering of the mirror scraped away to allow people (entering a door, for example) to be filmed through the mirror so that they appeared to be present in the museum (in later years, American development of traveling matte and other process photography methods largely replaced the Shufftan process).
• ^[?] Michael Powell claims to have suggested the use of The British Museum as the location for the final pursuit, thus beginning Alfred Hitchcock's use of famous landmarks in his "chase" films.