When British officials finally screened the two films, not too surprisingly, they were stunned to learn they had been given something quite different from what they had bargained for. The films, a cooperative venture of Milestone Film & Video in New York and the British Film Institute, are both in French and carry English subtitles provided by British film scholar Tom Milne.
Los Angeles Hitchcock fans will also be able to see them on the big screen, May 11 and 12 at the New Beverly Cinema, which will do full justice to the films’ superb black-and-white cinematography by Gunther Krampf, a German who was then in exile in Britain.
But the films, which the ministry ultimately deemed “too subversive” and cynical to be used as propaganda films, have languished in the possession of the British government since the ‘40s. The bilingual Hitchcock was asked to film the movies in French, so they could be smuggled into Occupied France to be shown to Resistance fighters there. The intricately plotted films-the 26-minute “Bon Voyage” and the 31-minute “Aventure Malgache”-were made in 1944 when, at the request of the British Ministry of Information, Hitchcock returned to England from Hollywood to make anti-Nazi propaganda movies. Even the most ardent Alfred Hitchcock buffs, who know every twist and turn of every film and TV episode the master of suspense presented, are in for a surprising cinematic treat next month with the release on video of two short Hitchcock films never before seen in the Unites States.
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