The lost 1923 Alfred Hitchcock movie discovered after 88 years: “The missing link”
When cinema was in its infancy, there wasn’t as dedicated a community of archivists and cinema experts as there is now, of course. In fact, no one quite knew what exactly was going to become of this new medium, which, while progressing rapidly, couldn’t possibly anticipate the changes that have come to define modern cinema.
So, many movies were lost or discarded without active preservation efforts, resulting in cinematic mysteries rich with intrigue. There’s something so fascinating about the concept of a lost film and its subsequent rediscovery, like when the 1923 British film Love, Life and Laughter was found in 2014 in an abandoned Dutch cinema. Then there’s The Appointment, the British horror movie, originally released in 1981, which disappeared for years before being found deep in the Sony Pictures archive in the form of a recording of an old television broadcast.
More exciting, perhaps, at least for cinephiles with a taste for the classics, was the discovery of a movie which heavily featured involvement from Alfred Hitchcock, which is possibly the earliest movie that the director ever worked on. Now that’s a big piece of cinema history that many people were ecstatic to discover.
Of course, he’d become a major filmmaker by the 1930s, making various suspenseful British pictures before moving to Hollywood in 1940 for Rebecca. From there, Hitchcock made countless big hitters, from Psycho to Vertigo, before retiring from the silver screen with 1976’s The Family Plot.
Yet his career had started way before this when he began working in various behind-the-scenes roles for British productions, such as designing title cards and serving as a production manager. Hitchcock was keen to get his foot in the door, and he knew that he wasn’t going to be able to direct a movie straight away. So, he kept working hard, showing his propensity for making strong artistic decisions, before obtaining his first chance at directing a film in 1922, which was to be called Number 13. Sadly for the filmmaker, it wasn’t meant to be, and the financial side of the production soon collapsed.
His actual feature debut came in 1923 with The Pleasure Garden in 1925, which followed the partially-lost short film Always Tell Your Wife. Yet, in 2011, a movie that Hitchcock significantly contributed to shortly before he became a director was found in the New Zealand Film Archive among a collection of unidentified nitrate prints. The White Shadow had been sitting there for decades, but the archive had ignored prints made by filmmakers outside of New Zealand because of funding issues. Finally, though, an archivist was given the job of going through these prints, courtesy of the National Film Preservation Foundation.
This eventually led to the discovery of the print by Leslie Lewis, who said (via the Los Angeles Times), “We pulled a bunch of reels from the nitrate vaults, and I just started going through them. The White Shadow was initially labelled Twin Sisters. I realised that this was most likely a film that Hitchcock worked on. I went to the archive the next day and used their research library to pull out some contemporary reviews and summaries, and confirmed it was The White Shadow.”
As Lewis continued to research the project, she discovered more reels, although only 30 minutes of The White Shadow had been pieced together, then. “I was inspecting another reel that was just identified as ‘Unidentified American film’. I put it on the table, and I recognised the actors and the sets,” she said, “I took dozens of photographs of each reel and then compared them, and they belonged together.”
So, The White Shadow, what author David Sterritt called “the missing link”, wasn’t a sole directorial effort from Hitchcock, but rather a collaboration with filmmaker Graham Cutts, who was reportedly rather unhappy with how well Hitchcock was taking to a major production role. It seems like he had every right to be anxious, though, because it wouldn’t be long before ‘The Master of Suspense’ would become one of the most influential filmmakers of all time.
