Number Seventeen (1932)

(On Cable TV, August 2020) As I’m digging deeper and deeper in the Hitchcock filmography, I’m starting to reach the bottom tier of his work, and Number Seventeen is clearly one of them. Despite a few intriguing moments, this is a film that doesn’t quite cohere. It looks, at first, like one of the single-setting style exercises that Hitchcock would keep exploring later in his career: the action is mostly centred around a staircase in a large house. But this isn’t true for the entire film, as things eventually move toward a speeding train. Throughout, we’re left mystified by poorly motivated characters, a tone that half-heartedly reaches for comedy at times but not at others. Number Seventeen lacks the spark that distinguished Hitchcock thrillers, even early ones, from most other contemporary thrillers. Oh well – they can’t all be first-rate, and it’s not as if he hasn’t done much better after that…