Secret Agent (1936)/Champagne (1928)/Blackmail (1929)

  Much like The 39 Steps, this movie makes use of the suspense-filled world of international espionage.  War hero Brodie (John Gielgud) is recruited to British Intelligence and sent to Switzerland to eliminate a German spy.  To help him, he is assigned two partners:  the General (Peter Lorre), a mercenary to actually pull the trigger, and Elsa (Madeline Carroll), to pretend to be his wife and handle all the administrative tasks.  But when things start to get complicated, Elsa ad Brodie begin to rethink where their loyalties lie.

This is one of the more well-known films in this collection and there's a reason why.  The star power is good, the dialogue is snappy, and the plot is twisty for the time.  The ending is a little pat but you can't have everything.
  This one took almost three days to get through.  I don't know why but it just did not grab me.  And not for being a silent film, either, since I generally like those.  This one I kept trying to place the score against various pieces from Fantasia.

Betty (Betty Balfour) is a socialite who runs off on a cruise to elope with her boyfriend (Jean Bradin).  Her father (Gordon Harker) thinks that he's a gold-digger and pulls out all the stops to keep his daughter from marrying.

Seriously, he goes to his only child and tells her that he lost his entire fortune, forcing her to live in squalor.  When she remains upbeat and even gets a job, he has a family friend (Ferdinand von Alten) basically stalk her to keep her from going back to her boyfriend.  I would probably sue my dad if he tried to pull that kind of crap. 


  Even though this was made only a year after Champagne, it's a talkie, one of the first to use a double-track for dialogue and score. 

Hitchcock's weird sense of morality is on display here as well.  Alice (Anny Ondra) has a fight with her cop boyfriend (John Longden) and decides to go home with an 'artist' she met at a restaurant (Cyril Ritchard).  He turns out to be a rapey sort of artist and, in the course of the assault, Alice stabs him to death with a kitchen knife.  Terrified (and traumatized) she runs instead of calling the police.  Thanks to a staggering amount of evidence left behind, her boyfriend quickly figures out that she's the murderer but he's willing to help her out.  Then some shady dude (Donald Calthrop) shows up, also with evidence from the scene and tortures Alice and her boyfriend by holding it over their heads.

Here's the thing:  you don't want Alice to go to jail because she's basically a nice girl but she did in fact kill a man (in self-defense) and clearly feels horrendously guilty as a result.  Hitchcock plays with that guilt, framing the blackmailer --who, I must stress, is NOT a murderer-- as worse than the person who committed the crime and the person who is helping to cover it up.  That puts a rather different spin on things, doesn't it?  Does he deserve to go to jail in her place just for being an asshole?