It was a case of one legendary director replacing another. Billy Wilder was in and Alfred Hitchcock was out, but the project was not a suspense-thriller, like “Double Indemnity.” It was a Holocaust documentary that was to incorporate devastating footage shot by Allied film crews during the liberation of National Socialist concentration camps. Only years later would a partial, incomplete cut see any sort of meaningful exhibition.
However, the British Imperial War Museums have recently reconstructed and restored the intended director’s cut of the bureaucratically titled “German Concentration Camps Factual Survey.” Yet, there is still more to the story that is finally told in Andre Singer’s documentary, “Night Will Fall,” which premieres this coming Monday on HBO.
Some Hitchcock completists will be familiar with what was retitled “Memory of the Camps” when it aired on PBS, but the print was decidedly rough and the final reel was missing. Technically, it had never been completed (a problem the restoration team rectified using the surviving screenplay and cue lists). While it was generally known that Hitchcock was more of an adviser than a hands-on director, Singer and company actually make a compelling case that his vision largely guided the direction and aesthetic of the planned documentary.
