Alfred Hitchcock’s Number Seventeen has been called many unsavory things, even by the filmmaker himself. It’s an oddity in Hitchcock’s oeuvre, full of half-baked ideas that don’t come together to form a cohesive whole. Yet few have actually seen Number Seventeen, as it floats around the internet and VHS and DVD collections in poor quality, public domain prints. Now that Kino-Lorber is releasing it, we all have a chance to properly experience one of Hitchcock’s weirdest films.
Number Seventeen opens in a typical Hitchcockian manner: one dark and stormy night, Forsythe’s (John Stuart) hat blows off and through the doorway of an empty house. As he rushes to retrieve it, he encounters, in quick order, a black cat, a strange man hovering on the upper landing, and a dead body. The man proves to be Ben (Leon M. Lion), a tramp looking for work who claims he wandered in to get out of the bad weather. The dead body is a mystery, though, as is the young girl who suddenly drops through the skylight. What ensues is a story of murder, theft, and mistaken identities, culminating in a train/bus/ferry chase and a swim in the Channel.
Number Seventeen takes place over the course of several hours in a single night, starting as a canted, haunted house story that moves quickly into comedy as corpses vanish and random families appear on the doorstep. There’s a sly humor running throughout in which one easily recognizes Hitchcock’s macabre sensibilities—as characters joke about killing a man with a sausage and flippantly challenge people with guns, as shadowy hands hover ominously over doorknobs, and dead bodies get up and walk. In the center of it is Ben, who, like the viewer, has stumbled into a macabre funhouse and just wants to leave. To treat Number Seventeen as a serious film is a mistake—it’s a comedy, and most of it is evidently play for laughs, from Ben’s deliberate mugging for the camera to his increasing distress at being accused of murder, to the utterly confounding motives and, I think, at least one character vanishing completely.
What makes Number Seventeen so bizarre, in many ways, is just how quickly it moves, jumping from a haunted house narrative to a crime caper and finally to a sudden, elongated chase sequence in which everything is revealed, none too satisfactorily.
And yet…and yet. Number Seventeen’s weirdness is quite entertaining, a great director playing around in a sandbox full of tropes and genuinely creepy images. Hitchcock deploys his adoration of expressionism and chiaroscuro to comedic effect when looming shadows resolve down into young women looking for their fathers. It struggles to hold together, yet just about manages to make things amusing, at the very least.
To my knowledge, this is the first time that Number Seventeen has received much restoration work, having been available in public domain of varying quality over the years. It’s a true pleasure to see any Hitchcock film restored so lovingly; given that the imagery is certainly Number Seventeen’s strong suit, this is especially welcome.
As Kino makes their way through Hitchcock’s British International Pictures output, we have a truly unique opportunity to see films from a great director that are often ignored or ridiculed as failures. And while some are certainly not successes, there’s a deep pleasure to be found in them. Hitchcock himself felt that Number Seventeen was a disaster; Truffaut was kinder, though he admitted he didn’t understand it. This is hardly one of Hitchcock’s finer British works; it’s a wild, lunatic film, confounding and nearly incomprehensible. And yet…
Number Seventeen is available on Blu-ray from Kino-Lorber.
