Here's some awesome and rather surprising news for lovers of film. Alfred Hitchcock's name is one that needs no introduction. The thriller/suspense genre would certainly still exist without him, but it wouldn't have nearly as strong a legacy without stuff like North by Northwest and Strangers on a Train in its past.

The surprise is that the first 30 minutes of the 1923 British film The White Shadow, on which Hitchcock is credited as writer, assistant director, editor and production designer, has surfaced in New Zealand, the Los Angeles Times reports. The footage will be screened in Hollywood on Sept. 22 at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences Samuel Goldwyn Theater and added to the Academy's Hitchcock collection.

"What we are getting is the missing link," National Society of Film Critics chairman David Sterritt said. "He was a creative young man who had already done some writing. We know the kind of creative personality he had when he was young and we know a few years later he started directing movies himself. What we don't know is how these things were coalescing in his imagination."