The last fifteen minutes of Number Seventeen are representative of Alfred Hitchcock at his finest: tense, thrilling, laden with spectacle, and very fun. It’s unfortunate that for a film with such a short runtime (under 65 minutes!), it spends its first three quarters treading water in a sloppy, lousy, mishmash of an Agatha Christie locked room mystery and an Oscar Wilde farce. 

The titular location is a seemingly abandoned house where a number of figures converge over the course of a dark and stormy night. There’s an awful lot of farting about during which the difficulty in telling all of the characters apart is made even more complicated by the fact that a lot of proper names are thrown around—Fordyce, Sheldrake, Brant, Barton, etc—among four of the five men, but the characters give false identities at different times and swap them about between each other. Two of the men even have matching hats and identical moustaches! The gist is that a very expensive diamond necklace has been stolen, some number of the men are criminals, one of them is probably a detective, a seemingly dead body is actually alive (twice!), and one of the criminals is accompanied by a woman named Nora (Anne Grey) who is pretending to be deaf and mute, for reasons that are never entirely clear. The only man who seems to be what he presents himself to be is a squatter named Ben (Leon St. Lion, who had previously appeared in the stage version), an alcoholic who has a much-abused sausage in his pocket. It’s all even less thrilling than it sounds. 

The plot gets going at last when the necklace turns up and it’s revealed that the house sits atop an access hatch that allows one to descend to a set of railroad tracks that eventually lead to a train ferry. A few of the criminals manage to board it with Nora in tow believing that the necklace is in their possession despite it having been picked from one of their pockets by Ben, while the man who introduced himself as Fordyce attempts to head off their getaway by commandeering a public bus. This is when things finally get interesting, as the thieves crawl around on the outside of the train to take out its various crew when they refuse to accommodate their demands, leaving a few petty burglars at the helm of a runaway locomotive that they don’t know how to stop. This is intercut with the rapid approach of the bus, as we watch the riders’ initial thrill of it all before they start to get tossed around a bit, and there are even brief moments when it appears that the bus and the train will collide, only for the engine to divert to an overpass while the bus passes through a tunnel that goes under the tracks. All the while, peacefully and inexorably, the ferry ship is coming into port. 

All of this is done with miniature work that most modern viewers would find laughable, but which I find utterly charming. That’s come to be one of my favorite things about revisiting his earlier films of late, from the impressive opening sequence of The Lady Vanishes to Young and Innocent’s delightful trainyard sequences. This was also a young director who just absolutely loved a train derailment, and Number Seventeen has one that involves smashing through a series of gates and crashing into a ship, with the train car bearing characters I presume we are supposed to care about are slowly sinking beneath the surface of the water like one of those convenient submarine air pockets that the photogenic leads on Baywatch were always finding themselves trapped in. It’s a delight, and it’s almost enough to save the film, but not quite. The final fifteen minutes alone in isolation are worth the ticket price, but if you can, just skip to that ending and don’t worry about the plot at all. Hitchcock didn’t. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond