With a film and TV movie about Alfred Hitchcock and even a new TV series based on his work, fans of the director have had a lot to check out recently. Now add nine more films, black-and-white silents that constitute his earliest-surviving work and will be shown together on an American tour later this year.
Made between 1925 and 1929, the movies, recently restored by the British Film Institute, include “The Pleasure Garden,†Hitchcock’s first film, about chorus girls in London. Even that movie displayed telltale signs of Hitchcock’s touch. “Already you have the obsession with blondes seen in ‘The Birds’ and ‘North by Northwest,’ the voyeurism of ‘Psycho’ and ‘Rear Window,’ even the theater setting he used again and again in his films,†Kieron Webb of the institute told the BBC last year.
The tour begins June 14-16 at the San Francisco Silent Film Festival before moving on to the BAMcinématek in Brooklyn at the end of June and then other American cities.
