‘Number Thirteen’: The movie Alfred Hitchcock was “talked into” making
We all have to do things in life that we’d rather not do. Doctor’s appointments, presentations, breaking up with someone – life has no shortage of things we’re talked into doing by other people who think they know what’s best for us. Rarely is that thing we’re talked into making a film.
That’s exactly what happened to Alfred Hitchcock, though, when he was offered his first chance to direct a movie. All aspiring filmmakers would dream of being given the opportunity to direct a movie – especially in today’s climate, where anyone who’s not already an established star has a slim chance of actually successfully helming a film – but this was a totally different climate.
Cinema was such a new invention when Hitchcock was starting out his career. There was no sound, no colour, and while filmmaking wasn’t exactly in its primitive stages – the first film had already been made before Hitchcock’s birth in 1899 – the most significant developments were yet to be made. Hitchcock was deeply interested in this burgeoning medium, however, and he got his start in the industry working small jobs that audiences didn’t give two shits about, such as designing title cards for films.
Hitchcock surely didn’t know back then that cinema would turn into an all-consuming leviathan of mass consumption, becoming one of the most lucrative and influential arms of global capitalism. He didn’t have a huge ambition to become an iconic director because so few existed back then – he was simply happy working behind the scenes in various editorial roles.
Yet, his evident skill led him to secure an opportunity that would subsequently change his life, and in turn, cinema. At the age of just 23, he was pressured into making his first film by a woman whom he admired enough to trust. He didn’t have the experience, but if someone thought he had the talent, maybe that was enough to carry him through his first directorial project.
“I was talked into Number Thirteen by the publicity woman of Famous Players-Lasky, who began to see something in me even before I’d got to writing or art direction, when I was just a young man around the editorial department,” he once explained. The woman was called Anita Ross, and she penned a script for Hitchcock to direct, with Clare Greet and Ernest Thesiger cast as the leading married couple.
Sadly, the film was never finished, because not only did Hitchcock not have the experience to conduct such a project, but he didn’t have the funds either. While he acquired enough money to start the project, the budget inevitably dwindled, and Number Thirteen was shelved and lost to history.
Hitchcock admits that he was blinded by Ross’ apparent association with the industry’s elites, which convinced him enough to take on the project. “She had worked with [Charlie] Chaplin, and in those days they thought anyone who’d worked with Chaplin knew everything. She wrote this comedy, and we tried to put it together. It wasn’t any, and it never saw the light of day.”
Just a few years later, however, Hitchcock would direct The Pleasure Garden, his first feature film, and while it’s a little too amateurish and only of interest to nerdy Hitchcock completionists, it truly marked the beginning of his directing career. He would soon rise to unprecedented heights as one of cinema’s most prominent pioneers, but this might not have happened if Ross hadn’t trusted him enough to give him his first taste of directing.
