Number Seventeen (1932)

Although I have not seen all of Hitchcock's UK sound films, this has got to be the worst. It opens like Dreyer's VAMPYR (released the same year as this), murky doings in an old house, people coming and going, a dead body disappears, and all in silence. Then characters arrive and interact with each other. However, without any exposition and with the sound recorded so low, one can't make out what is going on or what they are saying. The accents are omnipresent, the speech is fast, there is a cockney fellow, Ben, whose every word is indecipherable. Henry Higgins would have run screaming from the theater.After half an hour of this muddled dialogue and people wandering around encountering each other, we suddenly cut to a chase between two models, one of a bus, the other of a runaway train, for another half hour, until the obligatory crash at a canal barge, a few rescues and the end title. My print ran 1:05:33.This would have fared better as a silent with numerous title cards, explaining either what we just saw and/or what we are about to see. If indeed there was a plot. Or is this a joke, pulled over our eyes by Hitch, just to see what we'd make of it. There is a hallucinatory effect over the whole project, as if we were drugged and trying to make sense out of brain fog.In any case it is a waste of time and along with JUNO AND THE PAYCOCK three years earlier, a true low in the director's oeuvre.

It's not really worth sitting through unless you're very curious about Hitchcock's early work.There are some innovative elements. For instance, after the credits, we see a sidewalk and a street. The wind is blowing scattered leaves alone the pavement. Then a concurring hat rolls into the picture followed by a man trying to retrieve it. It's not much, but it's typical.The movie itself makes no sense and isn't worth going into. It looks as if the director considered the movie a chore, rather like washing the dishes.Recommendation: Skip it. It's too dull.

Sir Alfred Hitchcock made many films whether silent or talkies. He wasn't a pioneer in the film world but his techniques and styles have become his trademark. This film captures his aim at touching upon the darkness of humanity but with a sense of humor. This film is set at number 17 house where many people have various reasons for visiting the house. The address has many purposes but living there doesn't see to be one of them. There is an exciting climax with a bus and train. The cast members appear more comfortable on stage than film but they do well in their performances. Until film, most actors worked on stage whether London or New York. The script has problems and is flawed but this film is still worth seeing to note Hitchcock's evolution of a film making genius.

Before Alfred Hitchcock found his real touch he wasn't making the highest quality films around. He was making mediocre and problem filled films like Number 17, a crime thriller about a group of criminals who rendezvous at a safe house after stealing a very valuable necklace. However, a detective is on their trail, trying to bust them and reclaim the necklace.Now, to be honest, I had to use IMDb for most of that synopsis because it really is difficult to tell exactly what is going on in this film. This films is so disjointed, the plot is so convoluted, and the characters are so poorly constructed that it makes Number 17 difficult and unpleasant to follow. The editing is choppy and all over the place, jumping from one scene to the next without hardly any rhyme or reason. It's simply a mess. Also, I don't usually critique a movie on technical aspects like this, but the sound quality in Number 17 is absolutely dreadful, and it makes it really hard to understand what the characters are saying at times because of the hollow muffled quality of the dialogue.But there's a silver lining to all the disaster in this shoddy film. For one, I can't dock Hitchcock at all for making the film. Apparently, British International Pictures forced him to make this film as a punishment for the financial disaster of his previous film, East of Shanghai. Subsequently, Number 17 was the last film Hitchcock made with BIP, and he considers it one of his worst films, if not his absolute worst. So we have to cut Mr. Hitchcock a little bit of slack here.But the rest of that silver lining comes from a few of the decent moments we find amongst the muck of Number 17. When Hitchcock isn't making a film with a great plot or decent characters, he's still doing something right. Each of his early mediocre films seems to have something interesting in it in the way that Hitchcock directs. There's always some interesting nuance he's experimenting with, and that's what makes watching very early Hitchcock mildly interesting. In the case of Number 17 he is experimenting a lot with lighting and shadows. Some moments work and others don't, but the experimentation is very fascinating if you enjoy watching the evolution of Hitchcock's work.If you're a Hitchcock maniac then by all means, see Number 17 because watching Hitchcock develop as such a masterful director is very interesting. If you don't care much about the Hitchcockian evolution then there's really no reason you would want to watch this film. It's nothing special, and it's not all that great of a film. In fact, it's honestly not even good.