The Mountain Eagle

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🎙️ EPISODE 652: 02.24.23                 Oh look, it's time for me to do a writeup for another LOST Hitchcock movie. Yippee! There are thankless and stupid jobs and then there's this. According to Wikipedia: "The film received mixed reviews and Hitchcock himself told François Truffaut he was relieved that the film was lost." And to that I ask, who the hell was losing these films?? Like, I'd understand it more if these were secretly made works that weren't shown to anyone. But this played in theaters? It had a production company and distributor? Jesus Christ. Get your act together, The 1920s! What even happened? After it played in the cinemas, all the copies just got thrown in the bin? I'm sure there's a incredibly simple explanation (that's probably not far off from my dumb guy's hypothesis), but it's still wild nonetheless.

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CHRONOLOGICALLY
⫷ EPISODE 651 - (YOU ARE HERE) - EPISODE 652B ⫸

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The Mountain Eagle is a 1926 silent drama film, and Alfred Hitchcock's second as director, following The Pleasure Garden. The film, a romantic melodrama set in Kentucky, is about a widower (Bernhard Goetzke) who jealously competes with his crippled son (John F. Hamilton) and a man he loathes (Malcolm Keen) over the affections of a schoolteacher (Nita Naldi). Six surviving stills of The Mountain Eagle are reproduced in Truffaut's book, and further stills have been found. In 2012, a set of 24 still photographs was found in an archive of one of Hitchcock's close friends. The Cine Tirol Film Commission has described it as "the most wanted film in the world", and the British Film Institute has the film on the top of their BFI 75 Most Wanted list of missing films and is actively searching for it. It was released on May 1, 1926.