Reviews of silent film releases on home video. Copyright © 1999-2024 by Carl Bennett and the Silent Era Company. All Rights Reserved.

The White Shadow (1924)

In 2010, the National Film Preservation Foundation proudly announced that 75 American films surviving in the collections of the New Zealand Film Archive would be repatriated to American film archives. Many of the films had survived only in the unique prints that had travelled the globe decades ago, only now to return to American shores. But, The White Shadow (1924) is actually a wholly British film from the production team of Michael Balcon and Victor Saville — a film that has the fingerprints of a young Alfred Hitchcock all over it.

Directed by Graham Cutts, this romantic drama casts Betty Compson in a dual-role opposite leading man Clive Brook. Compson was among a handful of American actresses lured to Great Britain to make a few feature films then return to Hollywood. The intent was to raise the prestige of British films worldwide by tapping into the drawing power of American actors. Oddly, in this film Compson (an American) plays a pair of British twin sisters and Clive Brook (an Englishman) plays an American playboy.

The White Shadow has survived in only three of its original five reels and only in its American release version. In the surviving footage, carefree Nancy Brent (Compson) meets Robin Field (Brook) during a Transatlantic crossing. In England, Robin is confused by a difference in behavior when he unknowingly meets Nancy’s withdrawn twin sister, Georgina.

Allegedly, Alfred Hitchcock wrote the adapted scenario, did the art direction, performed as assistant director, and edited the film. The stamp of Hitchcock is not apparent in this film made a year before he began directing films. (Know-it-all wags will point out that Hitchcock had directed the two-reeler Mrs. Peabody in 1922, but that film was never completed and released.) Look to The Lodger (1926) for the first signs of the future Hitchcockian brilliance.

— Carl Bennett