Hollywood premiere for Alfred Hitchcock's first ever film... found again after 23 years

By Daily Mail Reporter

Last updated at 2:39 AM on 4th August 2011

It may be more than 30 years since the death of Alfred Hitchcock - but the film maker is still surprising his fans.

Film preservationists claim they have found the first half of the earliest known surviving feature film on which Hitchcock has a credit - and say it gives a unique insight into his earliest working methods.

The first three reels of the six-reel 1923 silent melodrama The White Shadow were discovered by the National Film Preservation Foundation at the New Zealand Film Archive.

Discovered: Film preservationists say they have found the first half of the earliest known surviving feature film on which Alfred Hitchcock has a credit, The White Shadow

Directed by Graham Cutts, the then 24-year-old Hitchcock was credited as writer, assistant director, editor and art director.

Two years later he made his own directing debut with the chorus-girl melodrama The Pleasure Garden, before going on to direct such suspense classics as Psycho, The Birds, Rear Window and Vertigo.

Rare: No other copy of The White Shadow, which stars Betty Compson in a dual role as both angelic and evil twin sisters, is known to exist

David Sterritt, who wrote The Films of Alfred Hitchcock, said the newly-discovered film was 'a missing link, one of those few productions where we are able to bridge that gap of Hitchcock, the young guy with all these ideas, and Hitchcock the film maker'.

Director: Alfred Hitchcock

He added: 'Even though he didn't direct it, he was all over it.'

Foundation Director Annette Melville said the three reels, which last about 30 minutes, were found among films donated to the archive 23 years ago by the family of New Zealand projectionist and collector Jack Murtagh.

No other copy of The White Shadow, which stars Betty Compson in a dual role as both angelic and evil twin sisters, is known to exist.

Melville added: 'At the time, people said the plot was improbable. I'm putting a polite spin on it. Many said it was ridiculous.

'It's a totally crazy, zany plot with soul migration back and forth and all these improbable meetings.'

A restored print of The White Shadow will be shown on September 22 at the Samuel Goldwyn Theater at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences headquarters in Beverly Hills.

Sterritt, who described Cutts as a 'workmanlike director concerned with delivering movies on schedule and making sure the camera was in focus', said Hitchcock's influence can be seen throughout the images released from the film.

He said: 'The images are just awfully expressive and terrifically interesting to look at.

'It has a look - I don't want to call it a Hitchcock look - but I'd call it a more atmospheric and nuanced and effective look than Graham Cutts probably could have injected into a film.'

Treat: The first three reels of the six-reel 1923 silent melodrama The White Shadow were discovered by the National Film Preservation Foundation at the New Zealand Film Archive

Hitchcock, who died in 1980, broke into filmmaking in his native London in 1920, working as a title-card designer and working up through the ranks as a writer and assistant director.

His own directing output during his British years, before moving to Hollywood in the late 1930s, included The 39 Steps, The Lady Vanishes and The Man Who Knew Too Much, a film he remade in the 1950s.

His first Hollywood film was 1940's Rebecca, the best-picture Academy Award winner that he made for producer David O. Selznick.

Lewis J Selznick Enterprises, run by Selznick's father, had released The White Shadow in the United States 16 years earlier.

The White Shadow was found during the second of two searches by the U.S.-based film foundation, which received grants from the Andrew W Mellon Foundation to send an archivist to sift through American films preserved in the New Zealand archive.