EARLIEST HITCHCOCK FILM FOUND

In what one film historian called “the missing link” between Alfred Hitchcock’s early days in the movie business and his career as a celebrated director has been discovered in New Zealand. The first 30 minutes of the silent movie The White Shadow, made in 1923 when Hitchcock was 24 years old, was located in the New Zealand Film Archive along with other silent films that were thought to have been destroyed by the slow oxidation of nitrate film. The film stars Betty Compson as twin sisters, one good, the other bad, and Clive Brook. David Sterritt, chairman of the National Society of Film Critics and author of The Films of Alfred Hitchcock, told the Los Angeles Times that the film reveals Hitchcock’s earliest work as a writer, assistant director, editor and production designer.