All Slights Deserved

I've never been a driver but from what I understand for the majority of motorists the greatest challenges they are likely to face are negotiating traffic jams, speed cameras and adverse weather conditions. There are accidents of course and even the occasional road rage incident, but providing you have some basic common sense they seem to be few and far between. In the cinema, on the other hand, the unsuspecting traveller is never more than one wrong turning away from Hell's Highway. As with many fairy tales and folklore, mysterious strangers and the dread hand of fate are always waiting to strike and hurl characters into circumstances the like of which they never believed possible. Being a cheap and convenient setting it's long been a staple of 'B' movies; perhaps the archetypal example being the cult noir Detour (1945), in which Tom Neal's hapless piano player finds himself plunged into a surreal confluence of misfortune while hitchhiking his way to Califo...

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...