Austrian village holds out hope for lost Hitchcock film

Alfred Hitchcock at work on The Mountain Eagle in Obergurgl. Photograph: Courtesy of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences

Austrian village holds out hope for lost Hitchcock film | World news | guardian.co.uk:


(from the article)

Alfred Hitchcock arrived in the Tyrolean village of Obergurgl in October 1925, clad in knickerbockers, hiking boots and a felt hat, scouting for a location that resembled Kentucky. When he left several months later after completing his second film, the British-German co-production The Mountain Eagle, it's fairly safe to assume locals were glad to see the back of him.

Not only had he ordered the alpine meadows to be cleared of snow, caused a roof to collapse and become stricken by some sort of altitude sickness, he caused offence by declining to stay in the village inn and complaining about the guttural sound of their dialect.

Years later his sins have been forgiven, and now the Tyroleans are far more focused on what happened to the film, which, though released in 1927, has been considered lost for the best part of 90 years. Some fear it may have been destroyed because of its highly flammable nitrate base, but many still have faith that the picture, which has been ranked at the top of the British Film Institute's (BFI) "most wanted of the most wanted films", is still to be found in a fireproof safe or a film buff's attic.

Hopes were raised earlier this year by the discovery of 24 still photographs in the archive of one of Hitchcock's closest friends. The stunning shots were auctioned in Los Angeles earlier this month for $6,000 (£3,700).

Johannes Köck is among the hopefuls. "Wherever I go in the world talking to people from the film industry, I always appeal to them to go and look in their cellars, their attics, to call me any time of day or night if they find it," he says. The head of the Tyrolean film commission, CineTirol, whose job it is to lure filmmakers in search of dramatic alpine landscapes, Köck has been searching for the film since the celebrations of the centenary of Hitchcock's birth in 1999, when he first stumbled on evidence that the film was made in Obergurgl.