It seems like a job for Mr. Memory, the doomed savant from Alfred Hitchcock's classic The 39 Steps: Where has the great director's lost second film been hidden for the past 80 years?
Hitchcock himself may have disdained his 1926 silent feature The Mountain Eagle - he told François Truffaut it was "a very bad film" - but that is no deterrent to the British cineastes who have launched a worldwide treasure hunt for it.
"Sometimes a director isn't the best judge of his own work," said Brian Robinson of the British Film Institute, which has named The Mountain Eagle its "most wanted" lost film. "Anyway, if someone said, 'I've got these sketches by Leonardo da Vinci, but they're not as good as the Mona Lisa,' you'd still want to see them."
The BFI is on a Hitchcock tear at the moment, launching its quest for The Mountain Eagle at the same time as it is trying to raise £1-million ($1.6-million) to restore the nine silent films the director made in England before Hollywood came calling.
The story of The Mountain Eagle deserves a movie of its own: Hitchcock's second feature, made when he was 26, is the story of a dowdy schoolteacher pursued by a stalker into the arms of a hermit who lives in the Tyrolean Alps. The producers, wanting international appeal, hired the silent-screen sex goddess Nita Naldi, who showed up in Austria wearing four-inch heels and almost equally long fingernails, accompanied by a mysterious older man and a tiny dog. Hitchcock, with a fixation on fresh lemonade, carried a bag of lemons with him everywhere. When the picturesque Austrian village they'd chosen as the main location was snowed under, the director persuaded the local fire department to hose away the snow.
But the film's producers buried The Mountain Eagle after its opening, because they were much more enamoured of Hitchcock's follow-up, the groundbreaking thriller The Lodger, which established him as a budding visionary. "They didn't want to sully the reputation of their boy genius," Robinson said.
The film was last seen in very brief release in 1927. Where might it be now? Just about anywhere, apparently. Fabled lost footage from Fritz Lang's Metropolis was discovered after 80 years hidden away in a museum archive in Argentina. Robinson says the BFI was recently contacted by someone in Australia who has a longer version of The Lodger, which may contain extra scenes.
Lost films have been found in beehives, barrels, churches, chicken coops and garden sheds. As Robinson says, someone who stumbles on a mysterious film canister would be hard-pressed to guess what's inside: "Unless you have a projector, you don't really know what you've got on your hands."
Not just a mystery, but a potentially dangerous one: The early Hitchcock films, including The Mountain Eagle, were shot on highly flammable nitrate stock. (The BFI, which has 180,000 cans of nitrate film, runs the only cinema in Britain with a licence to show those movies.)
The Mountain Eagle is the BFI's heart's desire, but there are 74 other films in its current hunt, including Two Crowded Hours, the first film by the great British director Michael Powell, and 1983's Where is Parsifal?, starring Orson Welles and Tony Curtis, which was seen once at Cannes and never again. Anyone with a promising film canister can find more information at www.bfi.org.uk/saveafilm.
At the same time it's searching for lost movies, the film institute is looking for funds to restore Hitchcock's nine silent films, so that there will be a pristine digital copy of each in order that they can be sent to festivals or prepared for DVD transfer. Watching the movies - from the frothy Champagne, which the director referred to as "the lowest ebb in my output" to the landmark suspense story Blackmail - shows that Hitchcock's unique vision was in place from the beginning, Robinson said.
"When you watch these films, you see an incredible cinematic intelligence at work. They're not just for film students. They're for anyone who wants to be thrilled and moved and entertained."