Hitchcock’s British Films

Number Seventeen (1932)

Hitchcock’s next three efforts were seriously marred by his studio ’s financial difficulties. He directed Number Seventeen for the failing British International Pictures, then worked as producer for Lord Camber ’s Ladies, a quota quickie, “a poison thing. I gave it to Benn Levy to direct.”1 Hitchcock’s musical, Waltzes from Vienna, for Gaumont-British, he calls “my lowest ebb. A musical, and they really couldn’t afford the music.”2 All three films have their occasional charms but none is a success. Number Seventeen makes the strongest impact, for two reasons. It has a remarkable chase sequence, with jewel thieves and detectives scampering from car to car as the train hurtles through the night, finally colliding with a ferryboat. The film also has a comedy that shifts between the burlesque and the surreal. The film is based on a comic thriller that J. Jefferson Farjeon wrote for the well-known actor Leon Lion. Lion produced the play and starred in it. It was such a stage success that Farjeon novelized it as well. In the film Lion again plays Ben, a hobo formerly of the merchant marine, who is found in the deserted house (number seventeen) by a detective (John Stuart) who is tracking down some jewel thieves. Together they find a disappearing corpse; a plucky young girl, Miss Number Seventeen 1932 125 Number Seventeen Ayckroyd (Ann Casson), trying to find her father; and a gang of jewel thieves plotting to escape on a freight train that runs underneath (!) the old house. The detective hijacks a Green Line bus to catch up with the train. His romantic sympathies shift to an ostensibly mute girl (Anne Grey) in the gang. He ends up with the thieves under arrest and the girl (talking now), while old Ben saves the jewels. The deserted house and the train are two traditional settings for such adventure films. Hitchcock jams them together to guy both types. Of course, if a train can run under a house, then a bus can chase a train and a train can collide with a ferryboat. This all happens in Number Seventeen, with Hitchcock’s tongue even farther in his cheek than usual. “Number Seventeen reflected a careless approach to my work,” he tells Truffaut.3 To Durgnat, “That train, coach, ferry and all are clearly models doesn’t spoil things in the least, our natural preference for large-scale and genuine catastrophes being compensated for by nostalgic references to Hornby Trains and Dinky Toys, all taking on the curious artificiality of a dream, like a Trinka puppet film.”4 The toys still generate suspense. Twice the bus and train seem to be converging until a sudden bridge slips the bus under the speeding train. Hitchcock intercuts the bus-train race with shots of the slow ferry approaching its collision. Hitchcock contrasts rhythms, speeds, tones, as well as modes of transport. But he balances his fine control over tempo with a sense of the ridiculousness of his material. He gives the bus model human habitation by cutting in shots of the tumbled, indignant passengers, and such careful details as the “Stop Here for Dainty Teas” sign the bus hurtles past. Certain passages are surreal, like Ben’s description of the contents of his pockets: There you are, a handkerchief. I used that to gag him with. A piece of string. I stabbed him with that. Sausage: that’s what I hit him on the head with. In the novel instead of sausage it’s a “pencil. Real lead” that Ben claims to have used on the victim’s head.5 Hitchcock likes food, of course, but a sausage is a more surreal weapon than a pencil. The haunted house has the usual frightening wind, banging doors, shadows, vanishing Hitchcock’s British Films 126 corpse, surprise intruders, and mysterious lights that are played just over the normal tone. Ben is caught in a shadow-web that anticipates Cary Grant’s in Suspicion, but in Number Seventeen every wall quivers with shadows. The characters are equally strange. The jewel gang arrives after midnight under the arch pretext of seeing a house that’s for sale. The detective and the gang don’t drop the pretense in the film, though in the novel they do (167). The mute girl and another man do not belong with the gang. The characters share our puzzlement by the whole business, but carry on regardless. There is much confusion over identity. The latecomer eventually claims...