Whether it’s a discovery made due to one man’s hoarding or his
collecting habits is unclear — either way, a gem has been
uncovered in the form of Alfred Hitchcock’s very first film,
locked away for almost 80 years. The Academy of Motion Picture
Arts and Sciences screened the first 30 minutes of the famed
director’s 1923 film “The White Shadow” on Thursday at the
Samuel Goldwyn Theater in Los Angeles. Hitchcock wrote,
designed, edited and assistant-directed the film — “an
atmospheric melodrama starring Betty Compson in a dual role as
twin sisters, one angelic and the other ‘without a soul’” — when
he was just 24 years old. The silent film was discovered thanks
to a large treasure trove of films left by an avid collector and
cinema projectionist named James Murtagh in New Zealand. The
lone print was stored in a garden shed in the North Island town
of Hastings, apparently for decades, until the New Zealand Film
Archive got their hands on the hundreds of films in Murtagh’s
collection after his death in 1989. How