Hitchcock Annual

Two recent arrivals in the ever-growing library of Alfred Hitchcock books take complementary approaches. In their fascinating Hitchcock Lost and Found: The Forgotten Films, cinema scholars Alain Kerzoncuf and Charles Barr do what their title promises, burrowing deep into the archives to gather evidence on items from the tantalizing margins of Hitchcock's filmography. This means investigating movies that were contemplated but not made, or started but not completed, or completed but subsequently lost—perhaps permanently or perhaps not, since discoveries like the recently unearthed reels of the 1924 melodrama The White Shadow, directed by Graham Cutts with major input from his young apprentice, still provide welcome surprises now and then. Contrasting with Kerzoncuf and Barr's vertical dive into Hitchcockian history, Robert P. Kolker's The Extraordinary Image: Orson Welles, Alfred Hitchcock, Stanley Kubrick, and the Reimagining of Cinema moves along a horizontal trajectory, [End Page 149] probing connections between selected aspects of Hitchcock's cinema and similar interests worked out in different ways by two of the very few filmmakers who can legitimately be called Hitchcock's peers.

In his foreword to Hitchcock Lost and Found, critic Philip French describes the director's career as "an enormous jigsaw puzzle of which we now have most of the pieces," fragmentary in some respects but lacking only two "largish segments" in their entirety: the never-finished 1922 comedy Number Thirteen and the vanished 1926 melodrama The Mountain Eagle (xi). The puzzle analogy is apt, and the never-ending quest for what Kerzoncuf and Barr call "lost or neglected or otherwise problematic material" draws power from Paula Marantz Cohen's remark (in her essay "Like Cows," The Times Literary Supplement [5 September 2008], 12), quoted twice in the book, that studying Hitchcock is "an economical way of studying the entire history of cinema" (ix, 2).

Accordingly, the authors of Hitchcock Lost and Found take the entire history of Hitchcock as their purview, focusing most intently on three periods. The first is the early 1920s, when Hitch went through the training and apprenticeship that preceded his directorial debut with The Pleasure Garden in 1925; the second is the early 1930s, when the advent of sync-sound production and the initial rumblings of television (!) brought fast and major changes to the British film industry where he was a rising star; and the third is the early 1940s, when he put his formidable talent at the disposal of the war effort, both within and alongside his major Hollywood features.

In each of those periods, studios were often slow to recognize the lasting worth of their products. Production facilities on both sides of the Atlantic saw their silent pictures as obsolete when talkies took over; found their early talkies rough and crackly when better technologies arrived; and regarded their war-related enterprises as pragmatic ventures geared wholly to the needs of the [End Page 150] moment. Hence the large amounts of material that were scrapped, junked, or indifferently stored even after the concept of film preservation started to gain traction in the early sound-film era. Hence also the wisdom of Kerzoncuf and Barr's decision to concentrate on these three periods, although their story extends to such later years as 1967, when Hitchcock worked on a project that had two successive titles ("Frenzy" and "Kaleidoscope") even though shooting never moved beyond the test-footage stage, and 1985, when Holocaust death-camp footage that Hitchcock helped edit belatedly saw the light of day.

The least familiar productions discussed in Hitchcock Lost and Found date from the period before The Pleasure Garden, and of these the most intriguing items are Number Thirteen, also known as Mrs. Peabody, and Always Tell Your Wife, a 1923 comedy that still survives in part. Number Thirteen would now be celebrated as the first film directed by...