DVDs & BOOKS

The White Shadow (1924)
Production Company: Balcon, Freedman and Saville. Distributors: Woolf and Freedman Film Service (U.K.), Lewis J. Selznick Enterprises (U.S.). Producers: Michael Balcon, Victor Saville. Director: Graham Cutts. Assistant Director / Editor / Art Director: Alfred Hitchcock. Scenarist: Alfred Hitchcock, from Children of Chance, by Michael Morton. Photographer: Claude L. McDonnell. Cast: Betty Compson (Nancy and Georgina Brent), Clive Brook (Robin Field), Henry Victor (Louis Chadwick), A.B. Imeson (Mr. Brent), Olaf Hytten (Herbert Barnes), Daisy Campbell (Elizabeth Brent), Bert Darley, Maresco Marisini, Donald Searle, Muriel Gregory. Transfer Note: Copied at 18 frames per second from a 35mm tinted print preserved by AMPAS from source material provided by the NZFA. New Music: Michael D. Mortilla (score, piano, percussion) and Nicole Garcia (violin). Running Time: 42 minutes. Incomplete (3 of 6 reels survive).

With their keen visual excitement, powerful sense of mood and atmosphere, and all-around cinematic excellence, the rediscovered reels of The White Shadow provide ample evidence that Alfred Hitchcock’s gift for motion-picture storytelling dates from the earliest stages of his career. He was still an assistant in 1924, working for the older and more experienced Graham Cutts, but every inch we have of The White Shadow confirms him as a precociously brilliant image maker with a dazzlingly bright future.

The skill and assurance on display also indicate why Hitchcock advanced so rapidly in the British film industry. Although he broke into the business as a designer of title cards conveying plot information and dialogue, he knew that one eloquent picture is worth a dozen printed texts. He refined his talent for conceptualizing and creating such pictures during his two-year tenure as assistant director for Cutts, with whom he worked on five movies, starting with Woman to Woman in 1923. All were made on economical six-week schedules. The first three were vehicles for Betty Compson, an important star at Paramount who came to England when Balcon, Freedman and Saville, the enterprising production company that employed Cutts and Hitchcock, offered her a staggering salary of a thousand pounds a week.

Hitchcock said later that Woman to Woman was “the first film that I had really got my hands onto,” and it proved to be a major hit. Reviews were good too; it was deemed the “best American picture made in England” by the Daily Express critic, who shared the British consensus that Hollywood movies were livelier and more entertaining than their English counterparts. Woman to Woman was among the few British films to do excellent business in the United States, and it also fared well in Germany, where previous British exports had sunk under the weight of lingering resentments from the Great War.

Dazzled by their own success, producers Michael Balcon and Victor Saville rushed a second Compson picture into production—The White Shadow—and whisked it to theaters with a conspicuously clunky advertising tag: “The same Star, Producer, Author, Hero, Cameraman, Scenic Artist, Staff, Studio, Renting Company as Woman to Woman.” It also had the same Paris setting, and again Hitchcock’s scenario was based on a work by Michael Morton, this time an unpublished novel titled Children of Chance. The box-office results were definitely not the same, however: The White Shadow “was as big a flop,” Balcon wrote in his memoir, “as Woman to Woman had been a success.” This not-withstanding, plans proceeded for three more Cutts-Hitchcock pictures, commencing with The Passionate Adventure in 1924.

The financial failure of The White Shadow was regrettable, but it paradoxically helped advance Hitchcock’s career. The film’s British distributor was C.M. Woolf, who owned the “rental company” referred to in the promotional tag. Woolf was famous for despising “artistic” moviemaking, and thanks to Cutts and Hitchcock, The White Shadow was far too artistic for his taste. Seeing its poor box-office performance as proof of his wisdom, he used the occasion to withdraw his investment in Balcon, Freedman and Saville, which subsequently went out of business. Balcon then set up Gainsborough Productions, which went on to become one of England’s most respected and successful—and, yes, artistic—production companies.

Among its first ventures were two Cutts-Hitchcock films: The Blackguard, also known as Die Prinzessin und der Geiger, shot at Germany’s great UFA studio for release in 1925, and The Prude’s Fall, also known as Dangerous Virtue, released in 1924. Soon thereafter, Gainsborough and two German companies would coproduce Hitchcock’s first film as director, the 1925 romance The Pleasure Garden. Two years later, again with Gainsborough’s backing, Hitch made the thriller he regarded as “the first true Hitchcock film”—The Lodger: A Story of the London Fog—and Woolf, still at war with artistic moviemaking, did his best to keep it out of distribution. Fortunately for Hitchcock and for us, he failed.

Cutts was 14 years older than Hitchcock, and he had a complicated love life that distracted him considerably during the younger man’s apprenticeship, leading to rivalry and envy on Cutts’s part. He belittled Hitchcock behind his back, according to Hitchcock biographer Patrick McGilligan, and matters didn’t improve when The Prude’s Fall turned out so badly that moviegoers “practically hooted it from the screen,” as a Variety critic wrote. Hitchcock had limited amounts of sympathy for Cutts—he later said he was “running even the director” when they worked together—but in the 1930s, when Hitchcock was a rising star and Cutts was looking for any work he could get, Hitchcock quietly helped him out.

These things said, it would be a mistake to think of Hitchcock as a self-assured young mastermind butting heads with a directorial hack whose time had come and gone. Hitchcock surely profited from his close observation of Cutts, who had entered cinema in 1909 as an exhibitor—dubbed “the master showman of the North” by producer-director Herbert Wilcox—and had made his own directorial debut as recently as 1922, when his melodrama The Wonderful Story was praised by Kinematograph Weekly for its “truth, realism and perfect acting.” His films of the 1920s, including many that he made after Balcon put him and Hitchcock on separate paths, were known for “spectacular production values, experimental virtuosity of camerawork and lighting and the intense performances…of his actors,” in film historian Christine Gledhill’s words.
According to the British film scholar Charles Barr, a leading authority on early Hitchcock, exaggerated accounts of Cutts’s mediocrity are traceable to Hitchcock’s authorized biographer, John Russell Taylor, who had a stake in asserting Hitchcock’s transcendental genius at every opportunity. In any case, Cutts weathered the commercial failure of The White Shadow and remained a big fish in the little pond of British film. Hitchcock would have mastered cinema technique and discovered his own inimitable voice under almost any circumstances—as critic Andrew Sarris has remarked, he and filmmaking were born for each other, and at almost the same moment—but Cutts was far from the worst senior partner he might have had.

Hitchcock also got to practice and refine a considerable number of skills while making The White Shadow: He was assistant director, set designer, scenario writer, and perhaps film editor as well, and this alone made the production a valuable asset to his budding career. Indeed, his experiences as a “general factotum” on this and other silent films never stopped paying artistic dividends. His goal as a mature filmmaker was to create “pure cinema,” meaning cinema that blends story, style, and technique into an expressive, suspenseful whole. As film scholar Sidney Gottlieb has definitively shown, the lessons Hitch learned from silent film never faded in importance for him. Even decades later and a continent away, he energized his greatest Hollywood pictures with lengthy stretches of unadulterated visual storytelling—think of the crop-dusting scene in North by Northwest (1959) or Scottie shadowing Madeleine in Vertigo (1958) or Jefferies spying on the killer in Rear Window (1954) or the extended sequence showing Marion’s fatal shower and Norman’s obsessive cleanup in Psycho (1960). These are only a few examples from a career that produced as many heart-pounding, soul-stirring visual sequences as any in the history of film.

Reviewers found the story of The White Shadow far-fetched, and they had a point. The plot synopsis filed for copyright purposes is amusingly hard to untangle, and shamelessly melodramatic to boot. But this didn’t stop critics from applauding the acting, the style, and the look of the production—precisely the elements that meant most to Hitchcock even at this early period. The outdoor scenes at Nancy’s home are spaciously composed and gracefully staged; the jazzy atmosphere of The Cat Who Laughs café is introduced with a striking—and startling—close-up of the eponymous statuette, then fleshed out with elaborately detailed long shots of the bohemian dive in full swing; the scene of misrecognition between father and daughter unfolds in close-ups that evince strong emotion with marvelous restraint. These and other sequences are exemplary of their kind.

Watching the surviving reels of The White Shadow, whether with an audience or alone, you realize the depth of young Hitchcock’s artistic talent as well as the enduring power of silent cinema. When the film comes to a halt in the middle of a bravura staircase shot, you’re likely to hear an audible sigh from those around you, and from yourself as well. But you’ll remember many images long afterward: Betty Compson’s impish smile and half-open eyes set off by a jauntily angled hat and a wreath of artfully positioned smoke; the motley crew of men at the poker table she effortlessly controls; Clive Brook’s steely gaze set off by a slash of light across an otherwise dark background; the graceful shading of an ivy-draped window framing a wistful face. Equally stirring is the rhythmic vitality—the superbly choreographed movement—of these moving pictures as they flow across the screen.

“Just as the sun casts a dark shadow,” the opening intertitle tells us, “so does the soul throw its shadow of white, reflecting a purity that influences the lives of those upon whom the white shadow falls.” The spirited whites, somber darks, and intriguing shades of gray composed and orchestrated by Cutts, Hitchcock, and their talented crew will be enjoyed by cinephiles for years to come. The return of The White Shadow is a triumph of film preservation, a bonanza for scholars, and a thrill for movie buffs, showing both Hitchcock and his chosen medium on the threshold of their fullest powers. These reels offer a priceless opportunity to study and assess his monumental creativity when it was first crystallizing in his imagination. —David Sterritt

About the Music
The main theme for my score for The White Shadow is based on the tuning of a violin (G–D–A–E), and these stacked fifths recur throughout the work. The score also has a little musical joke. Charles Gounod’s “Funeral March of a Marionette” is loosely quoted as the theme for the drunkard father in the film. This is the same theme Hitchcock used for his TV series The Alfred Hitchcock Hour (1962–65). There is some directed improvisation by violinist Nicole Garcia, particularly in The Cat Who Laughs cabaret scenes.

Perhaps the greatest challenge was the realization that the score could never be “complete,” because the last half of the film is lost. The question then became: How to approach the ending? Should the music provide a sense of completion? Should it just drop off abruptly, or is there another way?

Throughout the film are moments when characters get “lost.” Nancy runs away from home and disappears. Her father goes after her, and he disappears. The father and Georgina meet years later in The Cat Who Laughs but are essentially lost to each other, neither recognizing the other except perhaps with a sense of déjà vu. The musical device I employed in these instances was the use of claves with pizzicato violin, echoing the poignancy of missed opportunities. This device appears every time the characters find themselves wandering. As I approached scoring the end of the last surviving reel, I realized that the film itself was among the lost characters. Just as Nancy remains frozen forever on the steps of the café, The White Shadow stops mid-tale, the ending lost to time. The musical choice became obvious. The final visual is accompanied by claves with pizzicato violin, music that encourages viewers to complete the film in their imagination by giving a hint of what might happen next.

The premiere of the preserved print of The White Shadow took place on September 22, 2011, at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences in Beverly Hills, with Nicole on violin and myself at the piano. We played for the film again on April 17, 2012, in Washington, D.C. —Michael D. Mortilla

About the Preservation
The White Shadow was preserved through a partnership of the New Zealand Film Archive and the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences from a tinted nitrate print identified in 2011. The three surviving reels were among the materials transferred to the NZFA from Jack Murtagh and Tony Osborne. The preservation work was completed by Park Road Post Production, in New Zealand, with support from AMPAS and the NFPF.

Further Reading
David Sterritt provides an overview of Hitchcock’s work in The Films of Alfred Hitchcock (Cambridge University Press, 1993). The silent films are discussed extensively in Charles Barr’s English Hitchcock (Cameron & Hollis, 1999).