The Mountain Eagle 1926

Following the release of ‘The Pleasure Garden’, studio boss Michael Balcon dispatched Hitchcock again to Munich to make ‘The Mountain Eagle’, another melodrama, based on a story by Charles Lapworth called, ’Fear O’ God’.

An elaborate village was built at the Orbis Studios in Munich, and the exteriors were shot in Obergurgl and Umhaus in the Tyrol close to the Italian border.

His cast was again a mixture of nationalities: the American actress Nita Naldi; British actor Malcolm Keen and German actor Bernhard Goetzke. For Balcon, this multi-national cast, would help ensure its success in the English, American and German markets. Hitchcock’s cameraman was again Baron ventimiglia and as in ‘The Pleasure Garden’, the scenarist was Eliot Stannard.

The story is set in Kentucky in the USA and concerns a young woman who is accused of immorality and is hounded out of town by the local Justice of the Peace played by Bernhard Goetzke. The school teacher is given shelter in the hills by a recluse who is known as Fear O’God, played by Malcolm Keane. After a while, the couple return to the village to be married, but are accused of the murder of the Justice of the Peace’s son. Fear O’God is put in gaol where he is left to rot. His innocence is only proved when the son returns.

The film was hardly noticed when it was released and there is doubt by some as to whether it was released at all in Great Britain. “A very bad movie,” is how Hitchcock referred to it in an interview with the French director Francois Truffaut. Whether that is an accurate assessment we will perhaps never know for the negative and all prints have disappeared. All that remains are a few production stills which I have put together in the clip below. Who knows, perhaps one day a copy may turn up in some warehouse or attic in Germany, Great Britain or America. Now what a find that would be!