Alfred Hitchcock made Blackmail as his first sound feature in 1929, and Vertigo in 1958 during his most creative period. The two films share certain characteristics in terms of the way the filmmaker presents women and in the relationships the female characters have with the male characters in the two works, and indeed these same elements and approaches can be found in many Hitchcock films made between the two. Tania Modleski links Hitchcock's works specifically to sexual violence in her feminist analysis of his works, and she cites other critics on the subject when she writes:
In film studies, Hitchcock is often viewed as the archetypal misogynist, who invites his audience to indulge their most sadistic fantasies against the female (Modleski 17).
Modleski finds in her analysis, however, that the seemingly misogynist structure of Hitchcock's films involves a duality, with the second arm allowing for a critique of the structure it exploits and for a sympathetic view of the heroine who finds herself trapped within that structure (Modleski 25). This element of a trap is most evident in Vertigo, where the heroine is trapped in a cage she has created for herself, but it is also evident in the objectification of the heroine in Blackmail.
Indeed, this objectification takes place in both films, and what is wrong with the feminist criticism that sees Hitchcock as simply misogynist is that to come to that conclusion, one must ignore the way the films hold the males up to criticism for being objectifiers of women. Scottie in Vertigo is shown to be off-balance from the opening of the film, and the reason the wife of his client dies is because he is so gullible and so willing to accept an image for reality. The artist in Blackmail is openly a villain, of course, and he pays for his crime at the hands of the woman who would have been his victim. Her fear at revealing what has happened is more an indictment of her society and its att...