The National Film Preservation Foundation and the New Zealand Film Archive this week announced that they have uncovered the first thirty minutes of The White Shadow, a 1924 silent film for which a young Alfred Hitchcock served as writer, assistant director, editor, and production designer (the film’s director was Graham Cutts). The film was previously believed to be lost – as is the case for the majority of films produced before the advent of sound. The nitrate print was among 75 or so “features, shorts, newsreels, and fragments” that were discovered in New Zealand last year, among them John Ford’s Upstream (1927), which had also been given up for lost prior to the collection’s discovery. The White Shadow – whose plot concerns an evil twin, plus “mysterious disappearances, mistaken identity, steamy cabarets, romance, chance meetings, madness, and even the transmigration of souls” – will be screened on September 22nd at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences’ Samuel Goldwyn Theater. More info on the find here and here.
