Above you’ll find Alfred Hitchcock’s Number Seventeen, free to watch in its entirety. Released in 1932, the film finds a gang of jewel thieves desperate to hide their latest bounty, a diamond necklace. Just when they think they’ve found the perfect house in which to stash it — the Number Seventeen of the title — their plans begin to unravel when various outsiders (including but not limited to a sneaky police detective) turn up there. Hitchcock delivers this story with an odd mix of suspense and comedy, and, perhaps as a result, it hasn’t been one of his most widely seen pictures. But you can watch it with a click of a mouse, just as you can any of the films in our collection of 21 Free Hitchcock Movies Online. There you can experience many evenings of entertainment from the English-turned-American master of twentieth-century cinematic suspense. From his Daphne du Maurier adaptation Jamaica Inn to his early hit The 39 Steps to his British version of The Man Who Knew Too Much, Hitchcock delivers shipwrecks, conspiracies, paranoia, and uneasy romantic intrigue — all at no charge.
And if you watch all 21 free Hitchcock pictures, don’t worry; we’ve got more crime and mystery in store for you. Look no further than our collection of Free Film Noir Movies. Just above, we’ve embedded He Walked by Night, a gritty tale of postwar Los Angeles starring Dragnet’s Jack Webb. The film would go on to provide the basis for Dragnet itself. Or perhaps you’d prefer to watch The Lady from Shanghai, starring and directed by Orson Welles, which mixes film noir traditions with Welles’ own idiosyncratic, sometimes perfectionist and sometimes downright anti-perfection tendencies; “the weirdest great movie ever made,” critic Dave Kehr called it. If you’re looking for more noir Welles, our collection also contains The Stranger, his previous film. Starring Edward G. Robinson as a Nazi hunter, it came out as the first film after the Second World War to actually include footage of concentration camps. Both our noir and Hitchcock collections contain a great deal of history as well as a great deal of craft. They may not make movies like these anymore, but now it’s easier than ever to watch the ones they made back then.
Related content:
Alfred Hitchcock: A Rare Look Into the Filmmaker’s Creative Mind
François Truffaut’s Big Interview with Alfred Hitchcock (Free Audio)
Orson Welles Explains Why Ignorance Was the Genius Behind Citizen Kane
100 Greatest Posters of Film Noir
Colin Marshall hosts and produces Notebook on Cities and Culture. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall.
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