Film Team Hunts Lost Hitchcock

Mountain Eagle tops Brit Institute's 'Most Wanted'
By Rob Quinn,  Newser Staff
Posted Jul 6, 2010 3:58 AM CDT
Film Team Hunts Lost Hitchcock
The hunt is on for Alfred Hitchcock's second movie, which the director described as "awful."   (Getty Images)

Have you seen The Mountain Eagle? If so, the British Film Institute wants to talk to you. The 1928 silent Alfred Hitchcock thriller is top of the institute's 75-strong "Most Wanted" list of lost films. No surviving prints of the movie are known to exist, but institute officials believe a copy must be hidden away in an attic somewhere, the Guardian reports.

Other movies on the missing list include Sherlock Holmes' first screen appearance in the 1914 A Study in Scarlet. If Mountain Eagle is rediscovered it will be the centerpiece of the BFI's "Most Wanted" season, although officials warn that not every rediscovered film is a masterpiece, and Hitchcock was certainly no fan of his second-ever film. He once described it as "awful," and on learning that all known prints had been lost or destroyed, he said he wasn't sorry.
(More movie industry stories.)

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