18. Number Seventeen (1932)

Hitchcock's career at British International Pictures was wrapping up. He had wanted to direct an adaptation of the play London Wall, but BIP had given that assignment to Thomas Bentley (who would film it under the title After Office Hours, not to be confused with the 1935 Clark Gable film of the same title). BIP gave Hitchcock the assignment of this film based on a Joseph Farjeon play.

The plot has the film open at an abandoned house where a person arrives, sees a corpse and a simpleton who claims innocence. As the evening goes on, more people arrive, the "corpse" is now living and it seems that a stolen necklace is the MacGuffin and is to be escorted away from this house via train.

I apologize for the inadequate plot description (here is the Wikipedia entry in case you'd want to read it), but despite the film's 65 minute running time, the storyline is a completely confusing mess with characters being introduced rapidly and then have each one not being what they seem to be. After the halfway mark of the movie, I really found myself just waiting for this to end. Granted now, the train chase scene is somewhat exciting (even though its done with obvious models), but it's just too little and way too late.

Now, as mentioned before, the film was assigned to Hitchcock, but that's not really an excuse for shoddy directing and this bewildering script. You would really think that Hitchcock would make a better use out of an old dark house scenario, but as more and more characters are introduced, you really need to get the scorecard out to keep track. Leon Lion is the only performer in here worth remembering, but when he's the comic relief, it says a lot about the rest of the cast.

Hitchcock called the film a disaster. Variety echoed the film's confusion (which was echoed from the original play) and despite the chase scene climax, the movie was nothing more than a routine programmer. Viewers today haven't been that kind to the film as well with a 22% audience score on Rotten Tomatoes.

The movie is currently in the public domain and can be viewed on numerous streaming services and has been released on VHS and DVD numerous times, but beware the quality.