All Slights Deserved

The general consensus is that Alfred Hitchcock's earlier films are something of a mixed bag. After The Lodger 's triumph in 1926 came a spell in which Hitch appeared to be finding his feet as a director, trying different genres and approaches without the elan which would later characterise his work. Some, such as boxing melodrama The Ring (1927), have received positive reappraisal in recent years and it leaves you wondering whether they've been the victim of critical prejudice towards the definitively 'Hitchcockian'. Blackmail (1929), British cinema's first sound film, is considered his next watershed but again the view is it was followed by a fallow spell before his breakthrough with The Man Who Knew Too Much (1934). Sandwiched roughly halfway through this period is a minor suspense called Number Seventeen , that may be the most unloved work of his entire career. Given that Hitchcock, in his conversations with Francois Truffaut, referred to the film a...