Rescue the Hitchcock Nine

I've been watching (and in some cases re-watching) Hitchcock's silent films, and as anyone who's seen them can testify, the surviving prints are pretty much in terrible condition. The BFI is currently running a fundraising campaign to raise money to restore the following nine films:

The Pleasure Garden
The Lodger
The Ring
Downhill
Easy Virtue
The Farmers Wife
Champagne
The Manxman
Blackmail

The image above is from Blackmail. Check out the campaign by clicking on the banner on the side of this blog.

Blackmail (1929)

Considered the first "talking" picture produced in England, this Hitchcock film was begun as a silent. It now exists in two versions. I've seen the silent before, in a theatre with live accompaniment, and now I've watched the talkie version. I don't love this movie, find it pretty dull. The scene when Alice, the protagonist, is talked into going into the artist's studio, and subsequently stabs him to avoid being raped, is first-rate. The rest is pretty ponderous until an exciting chase through the Egyptian wing of the British museum.

An interesting note: the dishy Anny Ondry, who plays Alice, had a thick Czechoslovakian accent and had to be dubbed, but there was no post-production dubbing at the time. So she mouthed the words while an English actress spoke her lines just out of frame. It is not one hundred percent convincing.