Widely considered the first successful British talkie, Blackmail began as a silent film. Director Alfred Hitchcock used the mobility of silent film shooting for the elaborate set pieces (culminating in the British Museum) and cast native Czech speaker Anny Ondra as the prototype of his female leads. Her dialogue was later dubbed, and Hitchcock made judicious use of expressionistic sound to draw the viewer into her subjective space and deepen the moral and psychological dynamics of what may be his first masterpiece.