Number Thirteen: What ever happened to Alfred Hitchcock’s missing movie?

Dogged historians are continuing to try and find the British director’s lost first feature, writes Geoffrey Macnab, and its proven to be a mystery every bit as compelling as his later films

Alfred Hitchcock on the set of ‘Topaz’ in 1969 (Snap/Shutterstock)

This is the story of a movie that never was – the landmark Alfred Hitchcock film that no one has seen, or actually even knows a great deal about. The case of Number Thirteen (as Hitchcock called it) is as mysterious as that of many of the famous English director’s later suspense thrillers. It was his first feature and remains a source of enormous fascination for film historians and fans, but it wasn’t completed. Some production stills survive, including one that shows a youthful but already rotund Hitchcock giving instructions to cast and crew on location in east London, outside the Angel pub in Rotherhithe – and so we know he did make the movie, or part of it, but almost every other trace of the project has disappeared.

This year marks the centenary of Number Thirteen and is therefore a timely moment to look again at the circumstances in which Hitchcock conceived, produced and then abandoned the project. Dogged film historians are continuing to track down new information and the hope remains that some of the footage will eventually turn up.

A century ago, Alfred Hitchcock was a young man in a hurry. He was getting restless. The would-be movie director, then in his early twenties, had been working hard for US company Famous Players-Lasky (later to become Paramount) at its London-based film studios in Poole Street, Islington, on the site of an old power station. “Hitch” was busy designing title cards, doing the art direction and fixing problems wherever they emerged. This small, fat bundle of energy was absorbing information in an uncanny fashion. He had already picked up far more about filmmaking than most of his peers, even if they were much older than him.

The American studio bosses held the plump young wunderkind from Leytonstone in such high esteem that when the original director quit a project called Always Tell Your Wife, starring celebrated actor-manager Seymour Hicks, he was called in to help finish it off.

“Hitch”, then, was busy troubleshooting on behalf of others but was also clearly already harbouring strong directorial urges of his own. At this point, though, the story begins to get murky. In 1922, there were no schemes to finance low-budget debut features from young filmmakers. They couldn’t go out onto the streets and shoot guerrilla-style with digital cameras. Filmmaking was a time-consuming, labour-intensive and very expensive activity. Hitchcock, though, wasn’t the type to skimp or make false economies.

The still of the production from outside the pub in east London reveals that Number Thirteen was made on a significant scale. The young director is in charge of a small army of technicians and has even hired a photographer to capture images of the team at work.

“Obviously, he [Hitchcock] had organised himself like a proper production with a stills cameraman to hand,” Bryony Dixon, curator of silent film at the British Film Institute, tells me. “He knew no fear about putting himself forward to do things like that. He was very driven, very organised.”

Unfortunately, the young director was embarking on his debut feature at exactly the moment that Famous Players-Lasky was retrenching. The US company’s foray into filmmaking in Britain hadn’t gone well. Few of its movies had made money and the company was now putting the studio premises up for sale and laying off most of its staff.

Hitchcock had been kept on the payroll and seems to have spotted an opportunity to make his own film.

“There was a woman working at the studio who had worked with Chaplin. In those days anyone who had worked with Chaplin was top drawer: she had written a story and we found a little money,” Hitchcock later told French director François Truffaut, but he remained deliberately vague and evasive about the project. It was actually called Mrs Peabody. (The speculation is that Hitchcock called it Number Thirteen simply because it was the 13th film on which he had then worked.)

Alfred Hitchcock in 1926 (Courtesy of BFI National Archive)

Was this an early version of Hitchcock’s familiar, suspense-filled dramas about sex and death on the fog-shrouded London streets? Not at all, is the answer. Incongruously, it was a melodramatic comedy celebrating the work of a charitable housing association, the Peabody Trust. It starred Ernest Thesiger, the eccentric British character actor later seen as the mad scientist opposite Boris Karloff’s monster in Bride of Frankenstein (1935), and veteran character actor Clare Greet. The latter put some of her own money into the production when it became apparent that Famous Players-Lasky wasn’t going to pick up the bill. Hitchcock was so grateful, or so embarrassed about not paying her back, that he continued giving her bit parts in his subsequent movies for years to come.

Hitchcock’s uncle also invested in the film. Even so, the money ran out. Bryony Dixon very much doubts that Number Thirteen collapsed because its director was out of his depth. “He was born competent,” she tells me. “He had the kind of mind that could encompass an entire story and then work out the logistics and practicalities behind it.”

However, she acknowledges he might have underestimated ”how much the damn thing was going to cost”. In the film, Greet plays a charlady who buys a lottery ticket, dreaming of the immense wealth she might one day win. She plans to use the money to reward her friends and punish her enemies.

Leading British film historian Charles Barr argues that the plot includes some key themes found in the director’s later, better-known movies, in particular Hitchcock’s bristling resentment about the British class system. Contemporaries who met Hitchcock after he moved to Hollywood were often struck by how bitter and bruised he remained about the way he had been patronised in England because of his humble background.

Hitchcock’s ‘Number Thirteen' (Courtesy of BFI National Archive)

He had seen, and was an admirer of, JM Barrie’s play The Admirable Crichton, in which class roles are turned upside down and the butler on the desert island ends up in charge of the shipwrecked aristocrats. “The class aspect is an underestimated element in Hitchcock,” Barr tells me. He argues that Hitchcock was “consistently satirical and negative about the English ruling classes” and that it is significant that the director’s first feature was “at some level about the English class system and the master-servant relationship being inverted”.

This false start slowed Hitchcock down significantly. British cinema was in one of its regular crises in 1923/24 and his official debut feature, The Pleasure Garden, wasn’t to be made for another three years. Several Hitchcock biographies don’t even mention Number Thirteen. Others mention it only in passing. Nonetheless, curiosity has been continuing to build around it as potentially a key missing link in the Hitchcock story.

Will Number Thirteen ever be found? Other films linked to the director have turned up in unlikely places. The White Shadow (1923), on which he was an assistant director, was discovered in New Zealand in 2011 and greeted by the world’s media as a “lost Hitchcock”. Even more strangely, Three Live Ghosts (1922), for which he designed the titles, surfaced in a Moscow archive in 2015 in an incorrectly labelled film can. What’s more, it had been re-edited by the Soviets. The hope now is that Hitch’s debut feature will materialise in equally outlandish circumstances.

Dixon doubts this will happen. “It’s very, very unlikely and I will tell you why. Things turn up in New Zealand because New Zealand is at the end of the distribution chain. Things turn up in Peru and Argentina and Uruguay for the same reason. Films are distributed and go down the line and down the line to the point where it is not worth sending them back. But with this, because it was never distributed, the only person who would ever have kept it is him [Hitchcock] himself… if he didn’t keep them, no one else would.”

Charles Barr, though, strikes a far more optimistic note. In his research, he discovered a 1925 letter from another young filmmaker, Adrian Brunel, written to Michael Balcon, the boss of Gainsborough, the company that took over the Islington studio and for which Hitchcock directed several of his early films. In the letter, Brunel discusses “expanding” and reworking the Hitchcock comedy (which Barr is certain is Number Thirteen). Brunel had even “talked this over with Hitch himself”.

Hitchcock’s ‘Number Thirteen' (Courtesy of BFI National Archive)

This proves that Hitchcock was open to reviving the project. If Brunel had seen the footage, that meant it must have remained in circulation. “Maybe the film is there if you look hard enough,” Barr says.

Hitchcock’s second feature, The Mountain Eagle (1926), remains top of the BFI’s Most Wanted list of missing films, but almost everything else he made has survived and can be watched.

“Isn’t it amazing that we have nearly everything he [Hitchcock] made?” says Dixon. “Very early in his life, he became somebody whose work was worth keeping because he was such a prodigy, born a film director.”

The hunt for Number Thirteen is therefore bound to continue. To outsiders, this quest for a few missing reels of an abandoned silent film from a century ago might seem like a pointless academic wild-goose chase. Hitchcock himself claimed that the movie was of little interest. Nonetheless, you need only look at the ecstatic reception given to “The Hitchcock 9”, the 2013 touring programme of the director’s nine surviving silent films, everywhere from India to China, to realise the enduring appeal of the director’s work. Mark Cousins’s new documentary, My Name is Alfred Hitchcock, will again explore the enigma of how a grocer’s son from east London turned into one of the true giants of world cinema. Given his subsequent achievements, it’s little wonder that there is such an obsession with his very first feature and with the very Hitchcock-like mystery of just how the movie vanished.