A film “lost“in the memory, forgotten, briefly cited, crushed by the enormous fame and the tragic beauty of John Ford’s film of the same name, The Informer, we believe, is among the most significant examples of an unjustly forgotten season in the history of English cinema, the 20’s. It was in this period that we can find the roots of all the elements of the cinema of the following decade, films which brought greatness to English cinema. Together with English authors – Victor Saville, Anthony Asquith, Alfred Hitchcok – the London studios were open to many foreigners like Arthur Robison, German director of Schatten five years earlier. In the screenplay of The Informer (a famous novel by Liam O’Flaherty which narrates the betrayal of an Irish revolutionary pushed by a tragic love, a devastating jealousy caused by a terrible misunderstanding) Robison saw the chance to create a new, great film of shades.It is the shades of violent and personal passion that make the drama explode in the setting of the Irish Civil War which serves not as a simple backdrop for the personal drama, but which represents the cause, the ultimate meaning, setting in motion the atrocious destiny. In the oppressive backdrops, in the sombre photography, in the “expressionist” shots, it is alway the faces of the protagonists – the exceptional Lars Hanson and the desperate Lya de Putti – that design the substance of the drama. “A terrible beauty is reborn” wrote William Butler Yeats in his poem Easter 1916, and The Informer is in fact a terribly beautiful film that speaks of a terrible, fatal beauty.Completed at the Elstree studios in 1928, the film was supposed to be post-synchronized with sound effects and brief scenes with dialogue. The print preserved at the National Film&TV Archive is of exceptional photographic quality, but, unfortunately, it is without the soundtrack. There are some predictable sound “gags” obvious also in the silent version that make us regret the fact that this film has been only partially “rediscovered and restored”. The doubt remains as to whether or not John Ford saw this film – distributed only on the cinema club circuit in America – before giving us his version.