Review by
Eric Hillis
Directed by: Alfred Hitchcock
Starring: John Stuart, Leon M. Lion, Anne Grey, Donald Calthrop, Barry Jones, Ann
Casson, Henry Caine, Garry Marsh, Herbert Langley
Hitchcock: The Beginning is a new
11-disc bluray boxset from Studiocanal featuring 10 of Alfred Hitchcock's early films and a new documentary, Becoming Hitchcock, which explores the legacy of Hitchcock's first sound film,
1929's Blackmail.
In the final part of our 11-part review of the boxset, we look at Number Seventeen.
Like any filmmaker who delivered one or more movies a year over their
career, Hitchcock made a few bad movies, but Number Seventeen might be the only one he made badly. The worst Hitchcock movies
tend to hold some appeal for fans, whether it's some interesting
technical aspect or an underlying theme that hints at better work to
come. Number Seventeen however has nothing to please Hitchcock buffs, not even a cameo
from the director, which probably tells you how he viewed the production
(when asked about the film by Truffaut, Hitchcock's instant reply was "a
disaster").
Based on a 1925 play by Joseph Jefferson Farjeon,
which had previously been filmed as a German silent in 1928, Number Seventeen has the sort of setup that would soon become the stock-in-trade
of Hollywood's Poverty Row studios - a mystery set in a shadowy single
location with a bit of comedy thrown in. There's often a certain creaky
charm to such movies, but that's not the case here, as Hitchcock's film
works as neither thriller nor comedy.
The convoluted and nonsensical plot sees a snooping man named Fordyce
(John Stuart) come across an abandoned house (the number 17 of
the title) after midnight and poke his nose around inside. There he
first encounters homeless Ben (Leon M. Lion, reprising his role
from the 1925 stage production) before stumbling across a male corpse.
Fordyce immediately suspects Ben of murder, but things get complicated
when a young woman, Rose (Ann Casson), falls through the roof and
alerts Fordyce to a note announcing that a certain figure will arrive at
half past midnight. It turns out three people show up at that time: two
shady men - Brant (Donald Calthrop) and Henry (Barry Jones) - and a deaf-mute woman named Nora (Anne Grey).
What follows is a mess of complicated plotting, vanishing corpses, an
intensely annoying "comic" performance from Lion as a borderline
offensive cockney stereotype, and finally a high-speed chase between a
bus and a train. The latter is played out with some particularly
unconvincing models, but as a fan of such things I found it an adorable
silver lining to what is otherwise a damp cloud of a movie.
There's little to suggest Number Seventeen was made by arguably the most talented filmmaker working in
England at the time. The coverage and blocking are so haphazard that the
editing is often jolting in how it cuts between the large cast of
characters assembled in a small space. The film features what might the
first macguffin in a Hitchcock film, a necklace that has been hidden in
the house by a gang of thieves, but we're given no good explanation as
to why they would choose such an inconvenient spot.
Hitchcock had Number Seventeen forced upon him by British International Pictures, and he claimed
he had no interest in making it but saw the opportunity for a visual gag
involving a horde of stray cats running up and down a staircase every
time a gun is fired. Given the uncooperative nature of such creatures,
the stunt proved impossible to pull off so Hitchcock gave up on it. On
the evidence of the finished film, it seems he gave up on the entire
project.
Number Seventeen is part of
Studiocanal's 'Hitchcock: The Beginning' bluray boxset, available
now.