RetroClips

Blackmail was Britain's first sound feature, and Alfred Hitchcock famously shot it as a silent film and then, mid-production, reshot key scenes with dialogue once talkies became unavoidable, making it a genuine hybrid of two eras of cinema. The climactic chase across the British Museum's Reading Room dome combined real location footage with matte paintings and miniature work, an early example of the composite trickery Hitchcock would keep refining for the rest of his career. It's routinely cited as the moment his visual signature, vertiginous heights, silhouettes, landmark set pieces, first fully arrived.