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.