Alfred Hitchcock did not want to make this film. He had wanted to direct a prestige production of John Van Druten's play "London Wall," but to punish Hitchcock for the financial failure of his previous film Rich and Strange, British International Pictures head John Maxwell took him off "London Wall" and put him on "Number Seventeen" instead. Hitchcock himself has referred to the film as "a terrible picture . . . very cheap melodrama".
This was Alfred Hitchcock's last film as director for British International Pictures, though he made one more film for them as producer: Lord Camber's Ladies, directed by Benn W. Levy.