Number Seventeen

Number Seventeen (1932) is an early Alfred Hitchcock thriller — watch it online on iFILM. A stranger stumbles into an abandoned London house at night and finds a body. More people keep arriving, each with their own story, until a gang of jewel thieves and a detective in disguise are crammed into the same dark building together.

Hitchcock shoots most of the film in that single cramped space: narrow staircases, lamplight cutting across walls, characters talking past each other. At 63 minutes it moves fast, and the final sequence — a chase involving a runaway bus and a speeding train — was apparently the part the director enjoyed making most. Leon M. Lion, John Stuart, and Anne Grey lead the cast.

Hitchcock himself later called this a film he had been ordered to make and didn't particularly want to. That's fair — it's a minor entry compared to The 39 Steps or The Lady Vanishes, which followed a few years later. But for anyone curious about how his command of suspense developed in those early British years, Number Seventeen is a compact and honest look at the work in progress. Stream Number Seventeen (1932) online on iFILM.