The Lucky Number

Clifford Mollinson has been kicked out of football (the British variety) because he kicked a fan by accident. A couple of years later, he finds himself in Highbury with a ticket for a French lottery. He uses it to pay a bar bill to Gordon Harker, then discovers it is the winning ticket -- fourteen thousand pounds, and only Joan Wyndham to help him recover it.

I was struck that this movie, directed by Anthony Asquith, looked like a Hitchcock comedy -- if Hitchcock ever directed a sentimental musical comedy. Part of the reason is the dark cinematography, a lot of it shot around Highbury after dark, by German cameraman Gunther Krampf and Hitchcock camera operator Derick Williams. It's far too silly for Hitchcock, whose comedies tended towards the lugubrious, but charming for all of that. For Arsenal fans, there is a closing montage of a game with several of the current players on the field. Joe Hayman also has a funny turn as a very Jewish pawn broker named MacDonald.