Plenty to Like, Plenty to Dislike

i must have seen a different film!!

Yo, there's no way for me to review this film without saying, take your *insert ethnicity + "ass" here* to see this film,like now. You have to see it in order to know what you're really messing with.

It's a movie as timely as it is provocative and amazingly, for much of its running time, it is weirdly funny.

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 has been reported that Hitch shucked this one off after it was made and didn't have anything good to say about it. The Movie does seem disjointed and clunky at times and is certainly a product of its Era. But hold on. You would be hard pressed to find another very Low-Budget Movie from the early thirties with a final Third Act so frantically edited and exciting in its use of quick cuts and miniature manipulation.It zips along with a frenetic chase between a bus and a train and finally a Docking Pier that eerily anticipates modern Film Technique. It is true that Hitchcock abandon this visceral type of fast paced thrill for more crafted Suspense and toned down displays. But here He experiments with the tools at hand and shows why He would later be called a Master. This was Playtime for Hitch at School and it shows.The first half of the Movie with its Old Dark House sensibility has its moments too. Darkly lit with creepiness and shadows lurking everywhere with some limited remarkable Action and Plot twists. It all emerges as not all that clear what is going on and who is who, but this is not serious stuff, it is just for some Fun at the Bijou.

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.

During his apprentice years as a director Alfred Hitchcock took all kinds of assignments, many times directing items that originated on the stage like Juno And The Paycock. Number 17 got an increase of ten in the title, it was originally a play written by Joseph Jefferson Farjeon and when it got to Broadway in 1926 it ran for about a month with a cast you would probably not know. The play itself takes place only in the abandoned house where various folks congregate on a dark night. Several are jewel robbers, one is a detective. Just who is who is not really fully revealed until the end. Hitchcock really liked trains, he did much better with them in The Lady Vanishes and even better than that in North By Northwest. The British film industry was a lot poorer than the American one, but the fact he's using model electric trains in his high speed climax is rather obvious.With the exception of Barry Jones who played the off balance nuclear scientist in Seven Days To Noon, no one in the cast will be any kind of familiar to the American audience. The story which is always essential to me is really hard to follow. You might take one or two viewings and you still might not get it all right.