"The Mountain Eagle"...missing Hitchcock film

Alfred Hitchcock at work on The Mountain Eagle in Obergurgl.

"Austrian village holds out hope for lost Hitchcock film"

The Mountain Eagle, the director's second work, was filmed in Obergurgl but disappeared 90 years ago

by

Kate Connolly

December 28th, 2012

guardian.co.uk

Afred Hitchcock arrived in the Tyrolean village of Obergurgl in October 1925, clad in knickerbockers, hiking boots and a felt hat, scouting for a location that resembled Kentucky. When he left several months later after completing his second film, the British-German co-production The Mountain Eagle, it's fairly safe to assume locals were glad to see the back of him.

Not only had he ordered the alpine meadows to be cleared of snow, caused a roof to collapse and become stricken by some sort of altitude sickness, he caused offence by declining to stay in the village inn and complaining about the guttural sound of their dialect.

Years later his sins have been forgiven, and now the Tyroleans are far more focused on what happened to the film, which, though released in 1927, has been considered lost for the best part of 90 years. Some fear it may have been destroyed because of its highly flammable nitrate base, but many still have faith that the picture, which has been ranked at the top of the British Film Institute's (BFI) "most wanted of the most wanted films", is still to be found in a fireproof safe or a film buff's attic.

Hopes were raised earlier this year by the discovery of 24 still photographs in the archive of one of Hitchcock's closest friends. The stunning shots were auctioned in Los Angeles earlier this month for $6,000 (£3,700).

Johannes Köck is among the hopefuls. "Wherever I go in the world talking to people from the film industry, I always appeal to them to go and look in their cellars, their attics, to call me any time of day or night if they find it," he says. The head of the Tyrolean film commission, CineTirol, whose job it is to lure filmmakers in search of dramatic alpine landscapes, Köck has been searching for the film since the celebrations of the centenary of Hitchcock's birth in 1999, when he first stumbled on evidence that the film was made in Obergurgl.

"Hitchcock came to this God-forsaken place simply on the basis of finding a postcard of the romantic Oberburgl landscape that he had picked up at a kiosk in Munich," he said.

Köck went to LA where he found Hitchcock's notebooks, in which he described in detail his gruelling journey from Munich to Obergurgl, first by train, then horse and cart, and finally on foot.

"Coming to Obergurgl then would be the equivalent today of heading to a village in the Himalayas – remote and without any modern transport or proper roads," says Köck.

The film project started rather inauspiciously, with Hitchcock waking up on the first day to find the meadows covered in snow. After waiting in vain for four days for it to thaw, he employed members of the local volunteer fire brigade to blast the snow away with their hoses. But in the process, a woman's roof was destroyed. The mayor demanded compensation from Hitchcock of one schilling, but he gave her two.

Filming was interrupted after Hitchcock suffered a bout of vomiting, which he later described as a physical reaction to his dislike of the guttural sounds of the Tyrolean dialect. Although he was a German speaker, he failed to understand the local tongue.

Such discomforts were somewhat offset by the bottle of Cointreau, a few bottles of whiskey and the lemons he had in his luggage. "Hitchcock had brought a whole sack of lemons with him, so at least he did not have to go without his favourite lemonade," says Köck.

It is though that the poor box-office success of the film, which was known in the US as Fear o' God and in German-speaking countries as Der Bergadler, may have had something to do with its obscure subject matter. Its plot revolved around a wicked father, a crippled son and a teacher. Both father and son fall in love with the teacher who flees to the mountains following the father's advances. A recluse falls in love with her, marries her, and there is a final showdown in which the father is accidentally shot.

Hitchcock was never happy with the film, referring to it in an interview with the French director François Truffaut as awful.

But fears that the picture – made years before Hitchcock's huge successes like Psycho, Vertigo and The Birds – might turn out to be disappointing have done nothing to deter cinephiles.

"Is it the great lost masterpiece?" asks Bryony Dixon, BFI's silent-film curator. "Probably not, but it's a Hitchcock, isn't it? So it would be sensational if it turned up."
Theories as to where it might be range from New Zealand, which in the 1920s was typically the last destination in the worldwide distribution chain, to Russia, where, as one belief goes, it may have ended up as war booty.

Yet experts are united on one aspect of the story: the Tyrolean landscape.

"That is its saving grace," says Dixon. "Hitchcock was very aware of the power of a good location, knowing that it sells your film for you."

It also helps Köck bring filmmakers to the region. "When they hear Hitchcock was here, their eyes often light up with delight," he says.

If the film ever turns up, Köck would love it to be shown in the now 400-strong community of Obergurgl, these days a buzzing ski resort.

"Then again, if it ever did turn up," he says, "it might be something of a disappointment that this beautiful, enduring mystery is no more."


Master of suspense and terror...Alfred Hitchcock's birthday

Master of suspense and terror...Alfred Hitchcock's birthday

Alfred Hitchcock

August 13th, 1899 to April 29th, 1980

Vertigo

[trailer]

1958

The Writer's Almanac...

It's the birthday of director Alfred Hitchcock, born in London (1899). His father was a greengrocer, and a strict man. Once, when the five-year-old Alfred misbehaved, his father sent him to the police station and they locked him in a cell for a few minutes to teach him a lesson. Hitchcock was so terrified that he was afraid of the police for the rest of his life, and he rarely drove a car so that he could not be pulled over.

Hitchcock directed great suspense and horror films, including Rebecca (1940), Notorious (1946), Rope (1948), Dial M for Murder (1954), Rear Window (1954), Vertigo (1958), Psycho (1960), and The Birds (1963). He was a notoriously difficult director — he knew exactly how he wanted the entire film to look as soon as he and the writers had finished going through the script, and he was known to refer to his actors as "cattle." Critics have interpreted Hitchcock's behavior as a director in countless ways, writing long treatises on how he channeled his own repression, passions, and other psychological issues into his films and his treatment of his actors. But his life off the set seems to have been relatively quiet and uneventful. In 1926, he married Alma Reville, his assistant. They had a close working relationship — Alma went through every detail of each of her husband's films, pointing out whenever the dialogue sounded slightly wrong, or there was a slight flaw in the filming. Hitchcock was rumored to fall for many of his blond leading ladies, despite a lack of affection in return; and he often remarked to interviewers and friends that he was celibate, or impotent, or both. Whatever his married life was like, he and Alma were devoted enough to each other that they remained married until Hitchcock's death more than 50 years later. They enjoyed going to art galleries and dining out.

Hitchcock had a legendary appetite. He liked to say, "I'm not a heavy eater. I'm just heavy, and I eat." Apparently, shortly after Hitchcock came to America from England, he went out to New York City's 21 Club. Hitchcock ordered a steak dinner, followed by an ice cream parfait; then he ordered another steak dinner, and another ice cream; and then the entire thing one more time. At the end of his three meals and three desserts, he drank a cup of strong tea and a glass of brandy, and told his companions: "There is as much anticipation in confronting good food as there is in going on a holiday or seeing a good show. There are two kinds of eating — eating to sustain and eating for pleasure. I eat for pleasure." He had a full wine cellar in his home in Bel Air, and he had a soft spot for Burgundy wines, which is why he featured one so prominently in Notorious. Alma was a great cook, and her husband liked to help in the kitchen himself, and the couple often hosted large dinner parties. When Hitchcock received the American Film Institute's Life Achievement Award in 1979, he said: "I beg permission to mention by name only four people who have given me the most affection, appreciation, and encouragement, and constant collaboration. The first of the four is a film editor, the second is a scriptwriter, the third is the mother of my daughter Pat, and the fourth is as fine a cook as ever performed miracles in a domestic kitchen. And their names are Alma Reville."

He said, "The length of a film should be directly related to the endurance of the human bladder."

Alfred Hitchcock [Wikipedia]

An early Alfred Hitchcock film discovered in New Zealand

Alfred Hitchcock’s "The Birds"...a fine analysis

Alfred Hitchcock Trailer Collection

Psycho [Featurette]

Features...

Easy Virtue [1928]

Jamaica Inn [1939]

Sabotage [1936]

Secret Agent [1936]

The 39 Steps [1935]

The Farmer's Wife [1928]

The Lady Vanishes [1938]

The Lodger: A Story of the London Fog [1927]

The Manxman [1929]

Waltzes from Vienna [1934]

Young and Innocent [The Girl Was Young] [1937]

Television...

Alfred Hitchcock Presents ["The Sorcerers Apprentice"]

An early Alfred Hitchcock film discovered in New Zealand

Alfred Hitchcock in 1920.

"Early Alfred Hitchcock effort discovered"

A portion of 'The White Shadow,' a 1923 silent film that's considered to be his first credit, is found in a New Zealand archive.

by

Susan King

August 2nd, 2011

Los Angeles Times

It's the kind of surprise the Master of Suspense would have loved.

The National Film Preservation Foundation and the New Zealand Film Archive are announcing Wednesday the discovery of the first 30 minutes of a 1923 British film, "The White Shadow," considered to be the earliest feature film in which Alfred Hitchcock has a credit.

Hitchcock, who was just 24 at the time, was the writer, assistant director, editor and production designer on the melodrama, starring Betty Compson as twin sisters — one good and one bad — and Clive Brook. "The White Shadow" will have its "re-premiere" Sept. 22 at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences' Samuel Goldwyn Theater. The silent film will be added to the academy's Hitchcock collection, which also includes the legendary director's papers.

"What we are getting is the missing link," said David Sterritt, chairman of the National Society of Film Critics and author of "The Films of Alfred Hitchcock." "He was a creative young man who had already done some writing. We know the kind of creative personality he had when he was young and we know a few years later he started directing movies himself. What we don't know is how these things were coalescing in his imagination."

"White Shadow's" director, Graham Cutts, is described by Sterritt as a "hack" who didn't take too kindly to Hitchcock to the point that his "professional jealousy toward the gifted upstart made the job all the more challenging."

"White Shadow" was discovered in a collection of unidentified American nitrate prints that had been safeguarded at the New Zealand archive since 1989. That's when Tony Osborne, the grandson of New Zealand projectionist and collector Jack Murtagh, brought the highly unstable nitrate material to the archive. Because the archive only has the funding to restore its country's vintage films, experts couldn't spend much time with the American releases (though "White Shadow" was a British film it was released in the U.S. in 1924 by Lewis J. Selznick Enterprises). Selznick's son, producer David O. Selznick, would bring Hitchcock to America 15 years later to make "Rebecca."

"We took quite a lot of care into storing them. It was kind of an investment," said Fred Stark, head of the New Zealand archive. "We would wind through these films every 18 to 24 months, which enabled us to keep them from getting stuck, and if there were problems we were able to correct them."

Last year, the National Film Preservation Foundation, the nonprofit charitable affiliate of the National Film Preservation Board of the Library of Congress, received a grant to send an archivist down to the New Zealand archive to check out the American films in the collection. Some 75 features, shorts, newsreels and fragments were discovered last year and divided up between the academy's archive, the UCLA Film & Television Archive, the Library of Congress, the George Eastman House and the Museum of Modern Art. The biggest find in that cache was the 1927 John Ford film "Upstream," which was screened at the academy last year.

This year, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, which funded the first trip, gave the NFPF more funds to check out what was left. Annette Melville, head of the NFPF, noted that "it was kind of a different activity than the previous work, which had more complete films. A lot of these films will be partial films and fragments."

Nitrate expert Leslie Lewis is NFPF's Sherlock Holmes. She was the lead sleuth last year and also went through the material this time around with the help of the staff at the New Zealand archive. "We pulled a bunch of reels from the nitrate vaults and I just started going through them," Lewis said. "'White Shadow' was initially labeled 'Twin Sisters.'"

Inspecting the footage on the light table, she knew that this was a quality production because the tinted images were striking. "I went home and started poking around, did a lot of research and narrowed down the possibilities," Lewis said. "I realized that this was more like a film that Hitchcock worked on. I went to their archives the next day and used their research to pull out some contemporary reviews and summaries and confirmed it was 'White Shadow.'"

Initially, she only had two reels of the film. "But I was inspecting another reel that was just identified as 'Unidentified American film.' I put it on the table and I recognized the actors and the sets. I took dozens of photographs of each reel and then compared them [to the other two reels] and they belonged together."

Among the 60 other titles arriving soon on our shores is a 1928 two-color Technicolor short, "The Love Charm"; an early film from female director Alice Guy; a 1920 dance demonstration; and a fragment of a 1914 Keystone Kops lost comedy, "In the Clutches of the Gang." These "lost" films will be preserved by the five archives over the next three years.

[This article says Fred Stark is the head of the New Zealand Film Archive. His name is Frank Stark. Also, the article quotes nitrate expert Leslie Lewis as saying, "I realized that this was more like a film that Hitchcock worked on. I went to their archives the next day and used their research to pull out some contemporary reviews and summaries and confirmed it was 'White Shadow.'" The quote should have read, "I realized that this was most likely a film that Hitchcock worked on. I went to the archive the next day and used their research library to pull out some contemporary reviews and summaries and confirmed it was 'White Shadow.'"]

Alfred Hitchcock [Wikipedia]


Alfred Hitchcock’s "The Birds"...a fine analysis

Betty Compson

Betty Compson [Wikipedia]

The Incomparable Compson - A Tribute to Betty Compson 

False Pretenses

1935

Wikipedia...

When Mary Beekman, Irene Ware, loses her waitress job, after a fight with her loutish boyfriend, trucker Mike O’Reilly, Edward Gargan, she almost loses her life, chasing the windblown pay check, over the guardrail of a bridge.

Socialite Kenneth Alden, Sidney Blackmer, catches her. He’s lost everything, which isn’t already mortgaged. Both down on their luck, they assume that the other is there to jump off the bridge.

Instead, Mary has an idea. If Ken sells shares to a syndicate of his wealthy friends, in a phoney beauty product, they’ll have enough money for some clothes to pass Mary off in society, long enough to meet and marry a wealthy bachelor. Then, they can pay everyone back, with interest.

The con might work, except that Ken has too much integrity to marry for money, to Clarissa, Betty Compson; and, Mary is beginning to see his point, when she falls for Pat, Russell Hopton, who has secrets of his own.

The plot boils over when Mike shows up to blow the lid off. There’s a police chase. Mary is hauled off to the station; and, someone gets socked in the jaw.

It looks like no one is going to end up with anything, but a bad reputation; but, it’s not over yet, in this curious, romantic comedy, about the social set, in 1930’s America, from Chesterfield films.