Number Seventeen (1932)

 

Director: Alfred Hitchcock

Screenplay: Alfred Hitchcock, Alma Reville and Rodney Ackland

Based on the play by Joseph Jefferson Farjeon

Cast: Leon M. Lion as Ben, Anne Grey as Nora, John Stuart as Barton, Donald Calthrop as Brant, Barry Jones as Henry Doyle, Ann Casson as Rose Ackroyd, Henry Caine as Mr. Ackroyd, Garry Marsh as Sheldrake

Canon Fodder

 

Sausage. Hit him over the head with.

Number Seventeen promises a lot as an early Alfred Hitchcock film immediately, of expressionist shadows as a homeless sailor enters a house for sale, only to find another man and also a corpse there. Already you have awesome compositions, almost like a supernatural drama, of looming shadow hands alongside jump cut editing to a train to show shock. It is however, just in its title too, a weird film for Hitchcock, the kind of “weird” in terms of not a positively delirious title but something that is absolutely curious in his career. It is an oddity with virtues but a lot of issues behind its creation.

Hitchcock had to make this film, part of his career with British International Pictures¹. Despite the fact he had already made The Lodger: A Story of the London Fog (1927) and Blackmail (1929), and was becoming an acclaimed filmmaker, his career up to sailing to Hollywood and the United States for Rebecca (1940) includes films which stand out in premise (his personal project, the drama Rich and Strange (1931)), only to not become films which stand out the highest in his career, and titles which he made as a studio director whether he wanted to make them or not, such as the operetta film with Jessie Matthews, Waltzes from Vienna (1934). Number Seventeen, based on a thriller play by Joseph Jefferson Farjeon, has a suspense plot including one of the earliest McGuffins, if not for the first, for Hitchcock’s career in that it is a piece about jewel thieves swarming around this house alongside a detective, his daughter, a cop in disguise and the homeless man Ben (Leon M. Lion). Hitchcock however, in adapting this, decided to turn it into a farce on purpose tonally, which affects the final result.

The final film because of this is a really broad farce which does not really work. Hitchcock films can be legitimately funny, without becoming comedies but being suspense films which have incredibly dour winks at the banal mixing with the morbid – the cop in Frenzy (1972), one of his grimmest tales, whose wife is trying experimental cooking to his horror, or a key scene of Strangers on a Train (1951), whilst not played for laughs, being based on whether the lead can complete a game of tennis as quickly as he can – or incredible one-liners, such as the many Cary Grant has in North by Northwest (1959). This does eventually have charm, with Leon M. Lion as Ben, once you get past his initial gurning klutz performance, becoming lovable as a genial homeless man caught in the middle of this against his will, but a lot of the humour, being the slapstick to speed up fight scenes, goes over the head in actually landing. A lot of it being a pastiche of the suspense drama completely falls flat when it eventually gives up and becomes a more heightened crime film by the finale. Instead a lot of this feels like a stage play with Hitchcock managing to make it visually vibrant and soaked in shadows, entirely set at night, of a group of people ending up in this house all at once. The sense of this comes when one of its parodies, the female lead on the villains’ side who is so mysterious she is a deaf-mute, being jettisoned. When this character Nora (Anne Grey) just starts speaking, completely kneecapping one of its more idiosyncratic touches as quickly as it is introduced in a film only an hour long, you get the feeling Hitchcock made a legitimate mistake with his collaborators which effects the final quality.

Seventeen, by way of its finale with model trains, gets a really thrilling ending of escaping by train and the commandeering of a public bus to catch up with it, which shows how the film could have been cultivated into an ambitious and grander work by its director. The film had the potential to be a great production, full of McGuffins and plot points for the sake of getting to the next scene – corpses not quite dead, cops posing as lackeys, heroines secretly hiding in the villains’ side – as people fight over an expensive necklace. Even a scene of falling over a broken wooden railing does show how the comedic tone of the film could have mixed with suspense. What this feels like is a germ of a bigger work, and instead it is Hitchcock the master craftsman who sticks out than a successful result, still early in his career showing the mind which planned out his films carefully before they were filmed, compositions even here of the images which stand out incredibly. If it is a failure in Hitchcock’s career, but that does not mean you cannot appreciate the skills he shows here that would grow in his filmography.

 

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1) Alfred Hitchcock Collectors’ Guide: Number Seventeen (1932), written by Brent Reid for Brenton on Film and published on August 16th 2019.