As the authors concede on page 1 of Hitchcock Lost & Found: The Forgotten Films, there has been a lot of hype over the “rediscovery” of missing pieces from Alfred Hitchcock’s filmography. Alain Kerzoncuf and Charles Barr complain of “excessive” hoopla over the 2011 unearthing of an incomplete print of The White Shadow, a 1924 movie on which Hitchcock served as assistant director, writer and art director. Other cases are cited, especially the recent DVD released of a pair of documentaries, breathlessly billed as “Lost World War II Classics of Espionage, Suspense and Murder.” The short subjects, made for audiences in liberated France near the war’s end, were never lost but had been unseen for years.
In this latest addition to the University Press of Kentucky’s fine Screen Classics Series, Kerzoncuf and Barr are meticulous in sifting through the less acclaimed subchapters of Hitch’s career, including his formative apprentice years in early 1920s London, where he learned the distinction between surprise and suspense. Detective work comes into play as the authors find traces of Hitchcock’s hand, literally in the unreleased Always Tell Your Wife (1923), whose plot-triggering telegram was in Hitch’s handwriting. The director was involved in varying degrees with several Allied propaganda pictures during World War II, a less understood facet of his CV that the authors subject to detailed analysis.
Although it’s difficult to imagine any lost work from the peak years of Hitchcock’s celebrity, when his place in the pantheon of cinema was already prepared, Kerzoncuf and Barr find a few virtually unknown pieces of work in the form of extended public service announcements or filmed greetings to movie clubs.
The grail Hitchcock fans seek has never been found—his second feature as director, The Mountain Eagle (1926), remains missing. Hitchcock Lost & Found doesn’t change perceptions of a director about whom so much has already been written, but is an erudite collection of overlooked odds and ends and helps to clarify some fine points in his development as an artist. Ironically, given the book’s title, Kerzoncuf and Barr caution against the false excitement of inflating bits of recovered data into epochal events.
