h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

It's fair to say that Hitchcock's early talkies are a bit ropey now. After the success of The Jazz Singer in the USA, the race was on to make the first full-length talkie (despite some people thinking it was a gimmick that wouldn't catch on), and it just happened to be that in 1929, Hitch was positioned to direct the first talkie - Blackmail.

Such was the lack of faith in the technology, he was actually making a silent film for most of the production, and only late on did he add sound elements to Blakcmail. Then there was the problem that the film was set in London's East End, but his star, Anny Ondra, was German. Hitchcock's solution was to have an English performer speak the words off-camera while Anny mimed to them. The result is a film that's quite disjointed, with long scenes without dialogue (and those that do have dialogue tend to have inappropriately plummy actors pretending to be earthy cockneys.

One oft-quoted scene comes after the herione has just killed a man who tried to rape her. As she sits stunned in her mother's kitchen, a neighbour gossips about the news of the murder. The sound slowly fades out, except for the repeated use of the word 'knife' by the gossip, setting the heroine's nerves on edge.

The follow-up, Murder, was a comedy that perhaps loses its bite nowadays. Certainly most people who sit through it miss the fact that it's supposed to be funny because the performances are so large and stagey, and the central premise - that the killer is a mixed-race transvestite - is offensive on so many levels (hearing the detective declair that the reason the killer's girlfriend denies she loves him is because of the man's 'black blood'!).

Hitchcock's work doesn't really start to shine until the double whammy of the original The Man Who Knew Too Much and The 39 Steps (which in truth bears little resemblance to the novel). But his later films often rely on the techniques he learned back in the silent era.

I agree for the most part. Hitchcock's early work often seems wind-up and going through the motions, but compared to his contemporaries, even many of the bright lights in Hollywood, there is a personality to his work. The camera was the most important actor and sound was but a special effect.
His roots in silent films and title card writing helped with his storyboarding and often his establishing shots are are very brief and his cuts are rhythmic in a way that we didn't see truly incorporated until the advent of the music video.
The "McGuffin" makes it's appearance early on, as he was never one to let reason get in the way of a good plot.

That last point's a good one - would you care to take a stab at a definition for us?

Popular legend has it that a "McGuffin" was originally the point of an old shaggy dog story. For Hitchcock, it meant an excuse to get the plot moving. There was often a box, a bag, a secret formula, an unrevealed secret of an undefined nature, or, in a couple of instances, just a rumor that was chased, carried or hidden by the characters until such time as the film had gathered enough momentum that the "red herring" could be just dropped from the story line and the action gotten on with without the audience caring that the "snipe" or "wild goose" had withered into thin air.
In the case of "Psycho", there are perhaps three McGuffins present in the film:
1. The embezzled funds
2. The search for the missing sister
3. the mother

Just as with the cameos, Hitchcock didn't use the McGuffin in every film.