The 39 Steps - Alfred Hitchcock

Ahh, finally getting into some familiar films. At least for a while. Considering that Hitchcock made 53 films, it is interesting that about 19 or so are commonly known and thought of. At least 19 that I think are probably commonly known - The Lodger, The Man Who Knew Too Much (either version), The 39 Steps, The Lady Vanishes, Rebecca, Lifeboat, Notorious, Rope, Strangers on a Train, Dial M for Murder, Rear Window, To Catch a Thief, Vertigo, North by Northwest, Psycho, The Birds, and Marnie. Then again, maybe people only know Hitchcock from the really big movies - Dial M for Murder, Rear Window, Vertigo, North by Northwest, Psycho? I know that the first film of his I ever saw was The Birds. It wasn't until I was out of college that I saw some of his others. Anyways, The 39 Steps is probably better known that some of the films I have already written about.

The film stars in a theatre - this is something of a theme now. The Ring had a circus, Murder!, Champagne, The Man Who Knew Too Much all had some theatrical setting somehow woven into their story. Onto the stage eventually comes Mr. Memory, a man who has memorized a wide variety of facts and asks the audience to question him. After some comic questions like "where was my wife last night", Mr Hannay (played by Robert Donat) asks a question about a distance in Canada. After he is given the correct answer, a fight breaks out in the audience. A gun shot is heard and everyone starts rushing out of the theatre. Hannay is asked, outside the theatre, by an unknown woman who gives her name as Annabella Smith (played by Lucie Mannheim), if she can go home with him. She implies that she would feel safer and so Hannay agrees. Once they get to his place, she is quite mysterious and wants to make sure she is not seen from the outside - so lights are left off in rooms until she can be standing between the windows, or curtains are drawn. She tells Hannay that she is a spy, and she fired the gun because there were two men at the theatre who were going to kill her. She also tells him that they probably followed them to his place. She asks if he knows the 39 Steps, and mentions needing to go to Scotland. In the middle of the night, she stumbles into his room, tells him to get out of there, and falls dead onto his bed with a knife in her back. And we are off on a fantastic journey.

Naturally, the discover of the body is another scream transition where we see the landlady open her mouth but what we hear is a train whistle, and the scene dissolves into a train station. There are disguises, police acting like villains, and two people who don't know each other being handcuffed together. In this case it is Pamela (played by Madeleine Carroll) being handcuffed to Hannay. They did meet briefly in the train to Scotland when he burst into her compartment, and started kissing her without her consent in order to hide his face from the train conductors and police looking for him. There is some comedy brought in to their being handcuffed, but the non-consensual aspect of the kiss (while part of the "meet cute") is still troubling. Another troubling thing is the way the wife of one of the minor characters is treated, which includes an off-screen slap. The film is a great spy-thriller with some physical comedy, as well as romance. This is the film where the Hitchcock Blonde really begins - the female role that the leading man falls for. There is a cameo by Hitchcock, and from here it is more common than not to see him in his films. The version I watched was from the Criterion Collection (spine #56), which includes commentary, a British documentary about his early career, an audio adaptation that was aired as part of the Lux Radio Theatre in 1937, and more. This film was also adapted into a comic stage play with four actors playing the parts. This site provides a clip from that show, as well as a lot of other information about the original novel, what formats the film is available in, and remakes.