4 out of 5

Directed by: Alfred Hitchcock

I’m gonna give this one to Hitch, even though his retrospect on it was negative. But here’s my retrospective, completely made up from zero facts: Hitch wanted his oeuvre to be chock full of “art,” and anything that could be criticized as lacking that – and Number Seventeen was clearly clunky; and wasn’t Hitch’s first choice to direct – he was happy to throw it under the bus as a way to keep his real record of “art” clean.

Feel free to quote me on this made up fact, or what the kids nowadays call “facts.”

But anyhow, I’m gonna give this one to Hitch: this is legitimately his first talkie that… worked. I totally appreciate the apparent confusion at the time of the tone – is it a thriller, is it a comedy – but that is a mash-up the director had been trying for film upon film and kinda sorta whiffing on the balance; here, the only thing that really spoils it is that the story is a big ol’ mess, and the way it plays out in its central setpiece of a multi-story building makes zero logical sense. But I can kind of chalk that up to the “language” of geography in film still being formed; I’m more impressed by the execution of this as a concept, limiting the majority of the story / action to that central setpiece, and then totally going for it with its train-chase spectacle. Like, did I miss a film somewhere? Because otherwise, this felt like a huge ante up in competence and style, rather fully blending the director’s love for noir shadows and gothic angles with the tone of the story – not just random flourish – and actually casting / directing actors so that they felt like a part of the movie (and, again, not just flourish or, in worser cases, happenstances in frame). I get that the action was all miniatures or some rear projection, but it’s shot and edited damn well to pass for “real” most of the time, helpfully blended with what do look like some legit (and presumably legit dangerous) shots of people walking on trains, or hanging from them, or getting booted from them…

Number Seventeen is based on a play, which makes sense for its talky back-and-forth and confined setting of, mostly, a single building in which several people converge for… reasons: Fordyce (John Stuart) enters via a great tracking shot maybe because he saw a light in the window – great reason – and discovers Ben (Leon M. Lion), a roustabout who’s rousting about, and they both discover what appears to be a dead body, then get interrupted in their discovery first by a dame (Ann Casson) falling through the ceiling (!) and then by a clown-car’s worth of tuffs who knock on the door half past midnight. There’s firstly the mystery of the body, but if you were paying attention, also why the hell Fordyce is there, and then the swarm of Others, everyone talking at slightly cross-purposes.

There’s some straight-up slapstick, but also a lot of vaudeville-style tete-a-tete, which I’m sure worked well as a play, and which Hitch kind of wrangles into a visual tete-a-tete, constantly shifting people up and down the stairwell, and changing their positions relative to each other on floors and who’s-on-whose side, and things that happen one floor up apparently have zero direct impact on the other floor, and everyone has little memory of events / conversations that just occurred… and that’s the aforementioned illogic. But its the way this stuff is shot, and the way the tone juggles its comedy with its tensions that feels like the first true “Hitchcock” film, chronologically, and I’d think if not for its poor reception at the time, and the story being a sequence of forced misdirects and wilful ignorances, it’d be talked about more.

Its very brief runtime of 65 minutes also helps with Hitch’s thus-far habit in talkies (alongside his editors) of not knowing when to cut a scene; again, we’re still learning the language of film, but Number Seventeen finally felt like the first of Hitchcock’s sound pictures where everyone was talking the same language. Sometimes what they’re saying can be pretty silly, but they say it with incredible confidence and panache.