Watch The White Shadow, the Recently-Discovered and Earliest-Surviving Hitchcock Film

We’ve hooked you up with 20 free Alfred Hitch­cock movies online. We’ve writ­ten about Hitch­cock, the new Antho­ny Hop­kins-star­ring film that opens this week. Now we’d like to direct your atten­tion dear Open Cul­ture read­ers to The White Shad­ow. Even if you think you’ve seen every Hitch­cock movie, you prob­a­bly haven’t seen this one, giv­en that its sur­viv­ing ele­ments only recent­ly came to light. “For­get about that Alfred Hitch­cock movie star­ring Antho­ny Hop­kins that opens next week,” says the Hol­ly­wood Reporter. “Fans can watch anoth­er film with the famed director’s fin­ger­prints all over it — the old­est one any­one could pos­si­bly see, in fact — start­ing today [ … ] the ear­li­est sur­viv­ing fea­ture cred­it­ed to Hitch­cock.” It comes to us as a project of the New Zealand Film Archive, whose efforts have made the film stream­able here.

The catch: only three reels of The White Shad­ow sur­vive. But that’s three more than cinephiles could enjoy before their sud­den dis­cov­ery last year. A fundrais­ing dri­ve draw­ing on Hitch­cock enthu­si­asts the world over made pos­si­ble the restora­tion and scor­ing of these reels, not to men­tion their online stream­ing avail­abil­i­ty through Jan­u­ary 15, 2013.

You’ll even get a suite of asso­ci­at­ed fea­tures, includ­ing notes by crit­ic David Ster­ritt, a bio of salvager/projectionist Jack Mur­taugh, and a slide show doc­u­ment­ing the dis­cov­ery of the film. But this is Hitch­cock we’re talk­ing about, and even though The White Shad­ow came only three years into his career and appears in a halved state, it still deliv­ers his sig­na­ture com­bi­na­tion of atmos­phere, sus­pense, and con­trolled sen­sa­tion­al­ism. Whether or not you also plan to see Hop­kins play Hitch­cock or have a 20-pic­ture online Hitch­cock marathon, enjoy, while you can, this par­tial Parisian tale of twin sis­ters, “one angel­ic and the oth­er with­out a soul.”

Find The White Shad­ow in our col­lec­tion, 4,000+ Free Movies Online: Great Clas­sics, Indies, Noir, West­erns, Doc­u­men­taries & More.

Relat­ed con­tent:

Hitch­cock (Antho­ny Hop­kins) Pitch­es Janet Leigh (Scar­lett Johans­son) on the Famous Show­er Scene

22 Free Hitch­cock Movies Online

Mar­tin Scors­ese Brings “Lost” Hitch­cock Film to Screen in Short Faux Doc­u­men­tary

François Truffaut’s Big Inter­view with Alfred Hitch­cock (Free Audio)

Hitch­cock on Hap­pi­ness

Col­in Mar­shall hosts and pro­duces Note­book on Cities and Cul­ture. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.