Alfred Hitchcock with Anny Ondra on the set of Blackmail One of the purposes of a film's musical score is to assist the performers in eliciting a range of emotional responses from the audience such as fear, sadness, joy, or even pain. But what happens when a director makes the artistic choice to partially remove the score within a film? In the case of Alfred Hitchcock's Blackmail (1929), such a choice leaves us, as viewers, unsettled, forcing us to tap into the emotions of the main character without the familiar comfort of music directing us how to feel. Blackmail features one of my personal favorite sequences in early cinematic history, and as such, I felt compelled to simply put my thoughts to words in a little writing exercise by taking a look at some of the techniques Hitchcock used, as well as Anny Ondra's captivating performance, both of which I admire. With the rise of talkies in the late 1920s, the beloved era of silent films was at its end. As major stu