During their average, everyday pastime of digging through “highly unstable nitrate material,” the National Film Preservation Foundation and the New Zealand Film Archive have discovered the first half-hour of The White Shadow, a 1923 British melodrama about a white basketball coach who teaches minorities self-respect twin sisters—one “angelic,” one evil—on which a 24-year-old Alfred Hitchcock served as writer, assistant director, editor, and production designer. The long-lost movie is considered to be Hitchcock’s earliest feature-film credit, where he served under the direction of Graham Cutts—a filmmaker described as a “hack” by National Society of Film Critics chairman David Sterritt, both a Hitchcock expert and a critic who definitely knows how to put a filmmaker in his place, even a dead one.