The 39 Steps (1935)

Canadian in London Richard Hannay’s (Robert Donat) life is quickly becoming very interesting. When the mysterious Miss Smith (Lucie Mannheim) picks him up in a music hall and asks to go home with him, he soon finds himself involved as an amateur in the spy business. For Miss Smith, as she explains, is a freelance agent, at the moment working against a foreign government (boo, hiss) whose spies have got their hands on some sort of secret concerning British Air Defence, and plan to get it out of the country soon. Miss Smith would rather sell their secret back to the British. Unfortunately, the enemy spies are onto her, and her little visit with Hannay is an attempt to beat them through the power of sheer randomness.

As it stands, she’s soon knifed in the back by someone. Hannay is of course framed as her murderer. Trying to save the secret from the foreign power himself seems the only way of proving his innocence. Alas, our protagonist’s only clues are the name of a village in Scotland and the phrase “The 39 Steps”. Soon he’s chased by the police, the enemy agents, and god knows who else; not exactly the situation an amateur whose main skill seems to be flirting wants to find himself in.

Even in 1935, when he was still working in the UK, Alfred Hitchcock was riding his hobby horses hard, so it’s not a surprise to realize this John Buchan adaptation is a film about a supposed everyman (who just happens to look and sound like a movie star) hunted by incompetent and untrustworthy authorities, shadowy figures, and untrustworthy shadowy authority figures while chasing after a McGuffin. I’m not complaining, of course, for this set-up plays to many of the directors strength, delivering the perfect scaffold to hang episodes with highly memorable side characters (personal favourite: the crofter and his too young, romantic wife who both suggest a whole movie of their own Hannay’s just an episodic encounter in), the typically cleverly constructed suspense sequences, and a bit of quick banter on. Even only ten years into his long career as a director, Hitchcock was fantastic at this sort of thing, providing the film with an exciting sense of flow, and demonstrating an unwillingness to ever be stagey that was still not par for the course at this stage in the development of cinema. To modern eyes, some of the directors efforts may look a bit commonplace now, but that’s not so much Hitchcock doing much of anything wrong, it’s an effect of the immense influence his films had on more than one genre.

The film does also contain in embryonic form another Hitchcock standard trope, the cool blonde woman who is “tamed” (shudder) by his protagonist by treating her pretty rudely at best. In this case, the victim’s Madeleine Carroll, but The 39 Steps doesn’t drive this particular element terribly far – neither to be annoying or to be interesting - and stays closer to the “bickering means love” cliché beloved of popular culture even in the 30s.


The most important thing about The 39 Steps, though, is this: it is just a great, at its core straightforward - though Hitchcock obfuscates there quite a bit - story told in a way so accomplished it is still exciting and fun to watch more than eighty years after it was made – and not just for viewers specialized in films from the 30s and 40s.