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| Ann Casson and John Stuart in Number Seventeen |
Barton: John Stuart
Ben: Leon M. Lion
Ben: Leon M. Lion
Nora Brant: Anne Grey
Brant: Donald Calthrop
Henry Doyle: Barry Jones
Rose Ackroyd: Ann Casson
Mr. Ackroyd: Henry Caine
Sheldrake: Garry Marsh
Director: Alfred Hitchcock
Screenplay: Alma Reville, Alfred Hitchcock, Rodney Ackland
Based on a play by Joseph Jefferson Farjeon
Cinematography: Jack E. Cox, Bryan Langley
For the first part of the film, a bunch of people stumble around a derelict house, and for the rest of it most of them get on a speeding train and scramble around in pursuit of a presumably valuable necklace. There's a woman who's supposed to be a deaf-mute but turns out not to be and a corpse that's supposed to be dead but isn't, along with a giddy ingenue who falls through the ceiling and a cockney derelict who is supposed to supply comic relief from the gun-waving and running about. He doesn't, but the actor who played him, Leon M. Lion, not only got top billing but also a credit as producer. In short, Number Seventeen is a total mess. That it's atmospherically staged and photographed and the runaway train sequence is exciting in a mindless way are the positive elements we can ascribe to Hitchcock, who really didn't want to do this film version of a popular play, but agreed to anyway, then tried to turn a play he thought filled with clichés into a comedy thriller. He later called it "a disaster," and he was right.