Number Seventeen (1932) - film review

On entering a seemingly abandoned old house one night, a detective discovers a Cockney tramp named Ben and a dead body.  An attractive young girl named Rose suddenly falls in through a skylight.  She hands over a telegram which announces a group of thieves are shortly to arrive at the house to collect a stolen necklace.  Right on cue, a strange couple appear on the doorstep, masquerading as a pair of nocturnal house hunters...

Alfred Hitchcock was justifiably unenthused when his employers, British International Pictures, requested him to make an adaptation of J. Jefferson Farjeon’s mediocre stage play Number Seventeen.  Hitchcock rightly considered the play to be full of clichés and only took on the project with great reluctance.  Rather than make a serious thriller, he used the opportunity to send up the genre as far as he could, whilst performing experiments with lighting and camera movement which would have been impossible on a more conventional film.  The end result is truly bizarre – looking like a film noir that was concocted in Britain’s maddest lunatic asylum. 

Number Seventeen is certainly an atypical Hitchcock film -  an unbridled parody of the low budget crime thrillers that were prevalent in the early 1930s.  It probably helped that this film had a shoestring budget – evidenced by the poor quality of the models in the chaotic denouement.  The film has often been criticised for its production weaknesses and virtually incomprehensible plot, but such criticisms generally miss the point of the film.   Number Seventeen is a warning of what cinema was in danger of becoming - a mindless spectacle of muddled intrigue and artistic self-indulgence, without any real substance or meaning.  If Hitchcock were around today he would probably grin nonchalantly and mutter: "Told you so".

© James Travers 2008

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