LEYTONSTONE: Plea for help to restore Hitchcock films

The British Film Institute (BFI) is asking for the public’s help to preserve the cinematic treasures for future generations.

Decades of wear and tear have taken their toll on nine films Hitchcock shot in the 1920s and the original nitrate materials are in a very poor state.

All contributions are welcome but donors of £5,000 can adopt a specific film and recive an on-screen credit, while a donation of £100,000 will ensure the full restoration of an individual film with the donors name in the credits.

Actor kenneth A trailer for the appeal.

It is also hoped renowned composers will create a new musical score for each film.

The BFI describe the films as being “among the finest achievements of British silent cinema”.

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The full list of films to be restored with descriptions by the British Film Institute:

THE PLEASURE GARDEN (1925)

The opening sequence of Hitchcock's debut as director uncannily anticipates many of the elements that characterised his later work: the camera stares fixedly at the legs of chorus girls, a spectator leers, the audience is implicated. The diverging lives of two dancers are told in suitably melodramatic style: one ascends to the heights, the other stumbles into a marriage with a dangerous womaniser who goes spectacularly native with a girl in an unnamed colony. Shot in Germany and on Lake Como, the film was confidently 'signed' by Hitchcock with a handwritten signature on the opening credits, characteristically defending his decision: "Actors come and actors go, but the name of the director should stay clearly in the mind of the audiences".

THE LODGER (1926)

Hitchcock's third feature is the first true 'Hitchcock' film, and was called "the finest British production ever made" by the trade journal Bioscope. His first suspense thriller, it's about a mysterious lodger who might also be a serial killer terrorising fog-shrouded London - and, much as he would later do with Cary Grant in Suspicion (1941), Hitchcock cannily cast matinee idol Ivor Novello in the title role and challenged his audience to think the worst of him. Visually, it was extraordinarily imaginative for the time, most notably in the scene in which Hitchcock installed a glass floor so that he could show the lodger pacing up and down in his room from below, as though overheard by his landlady.

DOWNHILL (1927)

Novello again, here performing his own stage play, plays (somewhat implausibly at 34) model school student Roddy, falsely accused of getting a young woman pregnant. Expelled and disgraced, Roddy goes into self-imposed exile, reduced to renting himself out as a companion to lonely, wealthy women before winding up destitute and ill in Marseilles. Unusually dark for its day, Downhill is the first pure example of Hitchcock's much-revisited 'wrong man' plot, although it lacks the element of pursuit that drives more familiar examples like 1935's The 39 Steps. Fascinating for the way it fetishises Novello's suffering, and with some exceptional compositions (a sickly green tint when a delirious Roddy voyages home prefigures the much later Vertigo), Downhill is one of Hitchcock's most unfairly neglected works.

EASY VIRTUE (1927)

Based on Noël Coward's stage hit, Easy Virtue offers another early example of one of Hitchcock's favourite themes, the 'wrong man' (or in this case woman), forced to become an outsider because of universally presumed guilt. After Larita Filton (Isabel Jeans) is unjustly accused of having an affair, her husband divorces her and she flees to the South of France to escape the publicity. There, she falls in love and hopes to start afresh - but her would-be fiancé's mother has other ideas when they find out about her past. Witty visual touches include a puppy growing into a bulldog during her return to England, to show the length of time the trip took in the pre-Eurostar and Easyjet era.

THE RING (1927)

Hitchcock claimed that, after The Lodger, this is the next 'Hitchcock' picture. It's difficult to disagree. The story of an unsophisticated fairground boxer whose lover falls for the charms of a professional Australian fighter is told with innumerable expressionist visual flourishes, probably attributable to the time Hitchcock had spent in Germany. The title itself is ambivalent, referring to the boxing ring, the wedding ring and the serpentine bracelet secretly given by the Australian champ. This is Hitchcock's one and only original screenplay but its neatness and economy reveal a director already confident in his control of the medium.

THE FARMER'S WIFE (1927)

Hitchcock was worried that the stage roots of The Farmer's Wife (a hugely popular play by Eden Philpotts) might show through in his film adaptation. It was a needless worry. This semi-comic story of a widowed farmer's attempts to find himself a new wife is shot, as Truffaut observed, 'like a thriller'. The camera, on occasion handled by Hitch himself, observes the action cinematically, not from the perspective of a stage audience. Each prospective wife - the horsy one, the hysterical one, the high-spirited one - is presented as a comic stereotype. Rejected by each, the farmer ultimately discovers what has been literally staring him - and the audience - in the face all the time: his young, attractive and devoted housekeeper.

CHAMPAGNE (1928)

Hitchcock's second release of 1928 is an uncharacteristically slight comedy about a millionaire's decision to put an end to his frivolous daughter's engagement with an unsuitable suitor by feigning bankruptcy. Not a favourite with its director, who thought it "probably the lowest ebb in my output", Champagne nevertheless contains many flashes of Hitchcock brilliance, with witty shots through a champagne glass and a disturbing sequence in which the feckless heroine (the frothy Betty Balfour) imagines herself sexually assaulted by the man who (as it ultimately emerges) has been employed by her father to spy on her. The deftly observed voyeurism by this and other characters is another emblematic Hitchcock touch.

THE MANXMAN (1929)

The Manxman was to be Alfred Hitchcock’s last silent film, and, in the event, one of the best and most mature works of his early career. Adapted from a novel by Sir Hall Caine, a once celebrated author who specialised in stories set on the Isle of Man, the film was partially, and beautifully, shot on location, albeit in Cornwall. Set in a small fishing community, two boyhood friends take markedly differing paths in adulthood, but still manage to fall in love with the same woman. Tragedy inevitably ensues. Thematic anticipations of the director’s later work abound, from Gregory Peck’s tormented-in-love barrister in The Paradine Case (1947) to Kim Novak’s would-be suicide in Vertigo (1958), although such observations should not detract from appreciating the film’s own merits, not least the superlative lead performances.

BLACKMAIL (1929)

Through its mixture of location filming and roster of believable working-class characters, Hitchcock’s seminal thriller (made in both sound and silent versions) also succeeds as a rich evocation of London life. From its opening sequence with the police tracking down a wanted criminal (encompassing location and studio shooting), through scenes on the London Underground (studio), Whitehall (location), the Lyon’s Tea House at Piccadilly Circus (location), and on to the climactic chase in and atop the British Museum (location and studio), the film successfully eludes its theatrical origins. A highpoint in Hitchcock’s early career, and of British silent cinema, the director would later revisit and surpass the knife murder in Blackmail with those featured in both The 39 Steps (1935) and, most famously, Psycho (1960).