Silver Screenings

Well, here’s something we never saw coming: An Alfred Hitchcock movie that doesn’t quite hang together.

Number Seventeen (1932) is a thriller about a group of criminals who meet in a vacant house – at #17 – to retrieve a diamond necklace. But! There’s a detective prowling about who may blow the scheme wide open.

We in the audience are to wonder, Where is the necklace? Can the thieves trust each other? Will they make their escape to the Continent? And, Who among them is the detective?

This film is supposed to be a comedy, a send-up of the detective/crime stories popular in the 1930s. Hitchcock sprinkles it with baubles of amusement and black humour; however, these gems are forgotten in the utter confusion of the thing. We (yours truly) had difficulty keeping up with the plot, and several times we said, out loud, “Oh. Okay.”

Yet, there are some wonderful Hitchcock-isms, such as novel camera angles, shadows that play on the wall, and a wind-blown hat skipping down a street, leading its owner to the house at #17.

Alas, there are clichés, too: The lights go dark! A shot rings out! A woman screams! A pity it’s not a dark and stormy night as well.

Plus, the punches in the fight scenes are fake and awkward, and a corpse disappears, then turns up alive to take charge of the heist. It’s almost too much to ask of an audience.

Yet, this is a film worth seeing, because of the excellent race between a bus and a train.

Hitchcock used miniatures (models) for his Bus-vs-Train race, but how else could he film this excitement? We love the idea of an neck-and-neck competition between these two modes of transport.

The bus/train competition starts at #17 because – wouldn’t you know it? – the house happens to be built over a railway. (Just go with it.) By creeping down a long flight of no-handrail stairs, you can leap onto a train, and this the criminals do.

Our heroes jump on the train, too, but one of the good guys is literally booted off by a pugilistic criminal. The so-called Good Guy dusts himself off and hijacks a public transportation bus by holding the driver at gunpoint.

Meanwhile, the train bears down on a ferry bound for Continental Europe. Happily for us, the railway is right beside the highway the bus uses, so we can see the two engines try to overtake each other, and Hitchcock makes a real race of it.

Miniatures have been used by filmmakers for well over 100 years. Some recent-ish examples include Titanic (1997), the Hogwart’s Castle in the Harry Potter movies, The Grand Budapest Hotel (2014), and Jaws (1975). Many credit French filmmaker Georges Mélies as a pioneer in this milieu.

Filming miniatures isn’t as easy as it looks. You have to keep the miniature close to the camera while creating depth of field at realistic angles. Lighting, too, is crucial, as are the models themselves, i.e. are they too clean and perfect?

This isn’t the only film where Hitchcock used miniatures. He also employed them in Rebecca (1940), Rear Window (1954), and The Birds (1963), to name a few.

Number 17, by all accounts, was a box office dud. Audiences were confused by the story, and critics were lukewarm at best.

This was the last film Hitchcock made for British International Pictures and the material wasn’t by choice. He wanted to adapt the play, London Wall, about the amorous staff in a solicitor’s office. But the studio pays the bills, and it had plans for Number 17, so that was that.

However, historians say this film is the first time Hitchcock used a “MacGuffin,” a term coined by screenwriter Angus MacPhail. A MacGuffin, as you know, is an item or an event that drives the action. It’s not an important thing in and of itself, and can easily be dismissed once the characters get themselves and the plot sorted out.

Should you see Number 17? We think so, even though the film is confusing. Sadly, there are many poor-quality versions of this film, which doesn’t help matters, but we think the Bus-vs-Train race is worth it.

This post is part of THE 4TH MASTER OF SUSPENSE BLOGATHON, hosted by Classic Film and TV Corner.

Number Seventeen starring Leon M. Lion, Anne Grey, John Stuart. Directed by Alfred Hitchcock. Written by J. Jefferson Farjeon, Alma Reville & Alfred Hitchcock. British International Pictures, 1932, B&W, 66 mins.