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5.6/10
Senior Film Conservator
A definitive 5.6/10 rating for a film that redefined the boundaries of cult cinema. Number 17 remains a cornerstone of transgressive art.
Look, if you’re a completionist for early British cinema or just want to see Hitchcock trying to figure out how to film a chase without a massive budget, give Number 17 a spin. It’s short—barely over an hour—and it moves like it’s having a panic attack. If you need clean plots and characters you can actually track, skip it. You’ll be lost within ten minutes.
The whole thing feels like a stage play that decided to get drunk and run into the street. Most of the action happens inside this dusty, shadowy house that looks like it was built out of cardboard and bad intentions. The gang of thieves spend half the movie just bumping into each other in the dark, which is both annoying and weirdly hypnotic.
Around the halfway point, the movie suddenly remembers it needs a climax and decides to throw a train into the mix. There is this massive, frantic chase involving a bus and a train that is clearly just models being shoved around on a table. It looks completely ridiculous. Honestly, it’s the best part of the whole experience. 🚂
Some of the acting is... well, it’s loud. Really loud. Everyone is shouting their lines like the microphones were hidden in the next county over. There’s a detective character who seems to be playing a different movie entirely, all mustache-twirling and dramatic stares. It doesn't quite mesh with the rest of the crew, but who cares?
It reminds me a bit of the frantic, uneven energy in The Way of Lost Souls, where the atmosphere is doing all the heavy lifting while the script just kind of shrugs. You can see the bones of the later, better Hitchcock films, but they’re buried under a lot of clunky dialogue and shadows that don't always land where they’re supposed to.
It’s not a masterpiece. It’s barely a coherent movie. But it has this weird, frantic heartbeat that’s hard to hate. Sometimes you don't need a perfectly constructed narrative; you just need to watch a bunch of people run around a train set until the credits roll. 🍿
