2 out of 5

Directed by: Graham Cutts, Alfred Hitchcock (uncredited)

Rating the 40ish minutes that’s available of this 80ish minute silent-era film is a bit cheeky, but consider it a rating of what we have.

Rescued by a NZ projectionist and eventually preserved with an assist from the New Zealand Film Archive, what’s currently available on youtube can be of rough quality, but certain title cards have been cleaned up, and there’s a text “coda” that clarifies where the film was intended to go based on other artifacts. The edition I watched has a pretty fantastical score (though it switches to an odd, like, single-channel raspy vinyl sound for its final few scenes – not ill-fitting, just different); sampling some other editions on ‘tube it seems like they hit similar peaks and valleys in the music. I have no idea how these get mapped to different scores, but I will say I was more engaged because of the music on mine.

Unfortunately, I can’t claim the same engagement in the story. Directors / writers Cutts and Alfred Hitchcock (wiki lists Hitch as uncredited on both fronts, but the restored title cards mention him as ‘Assistant Director, Editor, Set Designer and Scenario) apparently made this quick and cheap to follow up previous hit Woman to Woman with star Betty Compson – she appears here as twins Nancy and Georgina via some early split screen / multi-exposure work that’s slipped in pretty seamlessly – before she returned to the US, and that quick and cheapness can be felt. Not so much in the production, which makes good use of a couple key sets (a small town; some spacious family rooms; a boisterous bar), but the way the story floats through its plot and characters – lots of tell, not show in the title cards – makes it really hard to get invested. Like, I appreciate that in this era the density of the writing was little, and the moral tone was what it was, but there’s still so little to latch on to that by the time the plot swings into its hook, its already cycled through a lot of our viewerly good will.

The gist: lively sister Nancy (Compson) returns home from a trip abroad, having met a man headed, Robin (Clive Brook), along the way. Fed up her by uptight sister, Georgina (also Compson), her alcoholic pop (A. B. Imeson), and emotionally distant mum (Daisy Campbell), Nancy takes flight – though not before playing a prank on Robin, and setting him up to meet with Georgina under the pretense of it being her.

Wholly upset by his missing daughter, alcoholic dad goes to find her… and goes missing. We flash forward to remaining sister Georgina living on her own, and she re-runs in to Robin and… pretends to be Nancy? A relationship moves forward under this pretense, with the footage we have ironically running out at the point where the truth is maybe about to be revealed.

I’d guess the source book provides some more on all of this – the father’s obsession; maybe there’s more than a title card mentioning the mother; maybe there’s more on the daughters’ differences beyond a couple of scenes of Nancy laughing and Georgina harumphing; justification for the persona swap (there is no subtext of Georgina wanting to “be” Nancy) – but it’s all presented very flatly. There’s some bit up front about the “white shadow” of Nancy’s missing soul or something; god bless women with personalities being treated as devils back in the day. However, the story speed runs through its beats to make much sense of that anyway, and robs the film of much emotion or a sense of consequence, which is kind of humorous considering how dire some of the stuff in it is. Compson is definitely entrancing to watch in both roles; the others tend to over-emote in the style of silents, though not to parodic extent (and Brook seems to always be looking at the camera?).

As far as watching this as a Hitchcock curio, there’s not much to pull from in terms of framing or production. I could guess at his touches, but it’s a reach. It’s competently made, especially the busy bar set I mentioned. That said, I can’t say it amounts to much more than a curio, and I can only imagine how much more cluttered the latter half was based on the text description of its who’s-who antics.