Alfred Hitchcock wrote in 1982: "The Hitchcock touch had four hands, and two were Alma's." Hitchcock began work on his tenth film, "Blackmail" (1929), when its production company, British International Pictures (BIP), converted its Elstree studios to sound. The film was the first British ""; it followed the first American sound feature film, "The Jazz Singer" (1927). "Blackmail" began the Hitchcock tradition of using famous landmarks as a backdrop for suspense sequences, with the climax taking place on the dome of the British Museum. It also features one of his longest cameo appearances, which shows him being bothered by a small boy
A. S. Hitchcock until his death in 1935. In 1912 he became Custodian of Grasses, Division of Plants, United States National Museum. Hitchcock remained Custodian without remuneration until his death. His field notebooks are archived in the Smithsonian Institution. He was a professor of botany in the Kansas State Agricultural College and authored over 250 works during his lifetime. The Hitchcock-Chase Collection consists of 2,707 drawings (mostly ink, but some pencil) of grasses, representing hundreds of genera, that were assembled by the Smithsonian Institution agrostologists Albert Spear Hitchcock (1865–1935) and Mary Agnes Chase (1869–1963). The collection is on indefinite loan to Hunt Institute