Wednesday, February 24, 2010

Number 17 (1932)

A pretty odd film. It starts great, with a man wandering into an abandoned house (17 is the street number) to find a corpse, a hobo, and a young woman creeping across the roof. Soon after, more people show up, none of them really explained, and it's like a surreal experiment. Unfortunately, it's not really surrealism, it's just plain incomprehensibility. Things straighten out by the end, and there's a big action finish, involving a train, a bus, and a ferry. It's great, if you don't mind some pretty obvious model work. Except for the very beginning, however, and the very end, it's pretty much a mess. Only for those devoted to seeing every film by Alfred Hitchcock.

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