Knife In The Ai Donen's Hitchcockism is capable of registering a formal problem in Blackmail, which is a film whose singularity makes it peculiarly difficult to grasp, as a joke.Blackmail is, as I've said elsewhere, probably cinema's finest achievement to date (March 2002). Up to the famous dinner scene, where the word "knife" is manipulated on the soundtrack to surreal effect, Hitchcock sustains a long development that is suddenly burst when Anny Ondra throws her knife up in the air, and the train of thought is dispelled, as it were.The spectator is made to feel that young Hitchcock has simply foozled it, that his sense of humor has gotten the better of him, that his Irish is up.And shortly you see that Hitchcock is taking the film to another level entirely (Kubrick also takes note of this with the flying bone in 2001: A Space Odyssey). Charade moves in a sustained development up to the phone booth confrontation between Hepburn and Coburn, which ends with her line, "I'm having a nervous breakdown," and then dissolves to the next scene.After such a display of concentration and precision, this dissolve is a formal letdown.And then Grant and Hepburn step into a hotel elevator going up, and Charade, you might say, moves to another level, literally.