Hitchcock classic: From garden shed to Hollywood

WELLINGTON:

The earliest known film by British director Alfred Hitchcock screens in Los Angeles this week for the first time in more than 80 years. The film would have been lost to history if it was not for an eccentric hoarder in New Zealand.

The only known print of the 1923 feature The White Shadow lay in a garden shed in the North Island town of Hastings for decades, alongside hundreds of other films from the silent era. The collection was assembled by Jack Murtagh, a cinema projectionist who New Zealand Film Archive chief Frank Stark described as a ‘magpie’ — unable to throw away the prints that passed through his hands.

Murtagh died in 1989 but his hoarding instinct has left a rich legacy for film buffs, which includes short films, newsreels and features from the early days of Hollywood that were bequeathed to the film archive.

Last year, researchers found the only surviving copy of a 1927 comedy called Upstream by American director John Ford — who went on to make highly acclaimed films like Stagecoach, The Grapes of Wrath and The Searchers.

They struck gold again this year, uncovering the first three reels of Hitchcock’s The White Shadow — a melodramatic story of two sisters, one angelic and the other a smoking, dancing rebel seduced by the nightlife of Paris. Hitchcock, who died in 1980, wrote the film’s scenario, designed its sets, edited the footage, and was an assistant to the British film director Graham Cutts at that time.

Stark said it was widely regarded as Hitchcock’s film, making The White Shadow and Upstream priceless opportunities for scholars to examine the fledgling efforts of two iconic film-makers. “They were both jumping off points for hugely important figures in world cinema,” he says.

Hitchcock was later nicknamed the ‘Master of Suspense’ because of his stylistic shots and fast-paced psycho thrillers and Ford became a record-setting director by winning four Academy Awards in the best director category.

(with additional information from IMDb)



Published in The Express Tribune, September 22^nd, 2011.