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| The crucial scene in "Blackmail" (1929). |
There is a new documentary out called "Becoming Hitchcock: The Legacy of Blackmail." It is currently available on TCM and MAX. It shows how director Alfred Hitchcock in "Blackmail" (1929) and other early films was developing his signature style.
"Blackmail" was Hitchcock's first 'talkie' and, in fact, the first film by a British studio that was entirely synchronized. There had been earlier films with lip sync in maybe one scene. So-called 'talking pictures' were so new and unproven that "Blackmail" was also released in a silent version, with title cards in place of spoken dialogue.
That's not what this post is about.
After watching the documentary, I wanted to see "Blackmail" itself. It's interesting for many reasons. The murder for which the heroine is blackmailed is actually self-defense, to stop an attempted rape. With nearly Victorian modesty, the attempt takes place entirely behind a curtain. Because there is sound, we can hear the struggle. Suddenly, we see a hand reach out through the curtain in desperation. On the bedside table is a loaf of bread and a bread knife--the murder weapon!
This is where I got distracted. Was it realistic, in 1929, to show an unsliced loaf of bread, needing to be sliced at table with a knife? Or was this a cinematic contrivance, a way to introduce the murder weapon? Was sliced bread still that uncommon in 1929?
It turns out, the answer is yes. One-hundred years ago, if you wanted a sandwich, you took a loaf of bread from the bread box, got your bread knife, and cut off slices of the desired thickness. This was not something you did once in a while, with a home-baked loaf or something special from the bakery. This was every day. Bread did not come sliced. If you wanted a slice of bread, you sliced it yourself.
(Whether or not a bread knife would be sufficiently stabby is a different question.)
The first practical bread slicing machine was invented in 1928, so right about when "Blackmail" was being made. It caught on so quickly that by 1933, 80 percent of all bread was sold already sliced. It was a big deal and led to a saying you still hear today, when some new invention is dubbed "the best thing since sliced bread."
It never occurred to me, when I heard that expression from my grandparents, that they remembered when bread was not sliced.
The transformative power of technology is nothing new and does not need to involve computer chips. Some innovations can change our lives so quickly we forget how it used to be in a generation or two. I'm old, so I remember when television was brand new.
To veer back into my usual lane, another technological change that occurred during that same period was to bottle-making. Bottles have been around since antiquity but until the early 20th century, bottles were all individually hand blown and expensive. Products like whiskey were not routinely sold in bottles. If they were, the bottles were likely filled by a dealer, not by the distillery. Brown-Forman began to sell Old Forester Bourbon in bottles in 1870. The Bottled-in-Bond Act was passed in 1897, but bottling didn't become common until Michael Owens invented the first commercially successful, fully automatic bottle-making machine in 1903, in Toledo, Ohio. When alcohol was re-legalized in 1933, bottling was not only common, it was mandatory. By law, distilled spirits like whiskey could only be sold in sealed bottles.
I also remember 78 RPM records. They were already old-fashioned when I was a kid, but my mom had quite a few. One of our favorites was the original cast recording of the "Peter Pan" musical, which we also enjoyed on TV. Captain Hook, in those broadcasts, was played by the actor Cyril Richard, who was the rapist in "Blackmail."
