The 39 Steps (1935) - Video On Demand

The 39 Steps - Movie Review

The 39 Steps is a 1935 film directed by Alfred Hitchcock, based on the adventure novel The Thirty-nine Steps by John Buchan. The film stars Robert Donat and Madeleine Carroll. There have been three major film versions of the book; Hitchcock's original has been the most acclaimed, and remains so today: In 1999 it came 4th in a BFI poll of British films, while in 2004 Total Film named it the 21st greatest British movie of all time.

The 39 Steps is one of the earlier Alfred Hitchcock British spy-chase suspense-thrillers from a vintage period, his 18th film. Considered his first real masterpiece, it is both a crowd-pleasing box-office success and an extremely influential film that brought the famed director attention from US audiences. The film's tightly-plotted screenplay was loosely based on the 1914 novel of the same name by Scottish author John Buchan, and freely adapted by playwright Charles Bennett, Ian Hay and Hitchcock himself. The film was remade twice afterwards, both in the UK.

The Thirty-Nine Steps, a contrived title, is Hitchcock's first film with a classic theme that he modeled repeatedly for the remainder of his career. It is the typical Hitchcockian story of an average, innocent, ordinary man who is framed by circumstantial evidence and thrust against his will into an extraordinary situation that he doesn't understand. This filmic model of the 'wrong man' was also found in Young and Innocent (1937), Saboteur (1942), and The Man Who Knew Too Much (1956), and culminated in Hitchcock's similar North by Northwest (1959) twenty-four years later - it is widely considered his "American Thirty-Nine Steps."

Over a four day period, the suave, imperturbable and clever male protagonist, played by Robert Donat who had recently starred in the swashbuckler The Count of Monte Cristo (1934) and was popularly known as the "Monte Cristo Man", is paired (literally handcuffed) to a classic, cool and icy, intelligent blonde maiden - Madeleine Carroll. She was the first in a notorious line of Hitchcock's female stars that later included Grace Kelly and Tippi Hedren. His exhausting cyclical journey to prove his innocence and to bring the spies to justice, in which he assumes numerous identities (i.e., a milkman, an auto mechanic, a politician, and a newlywed), takes him from London to the Scottish Highlands and back again, through a series of action sequences.

Hitchcock rated The 39 Steps as one of his favourite films. He felt that its tempo was perfect. There is no dead footage, and the audience's absorption in the web of intrigue creates the impression of extremely fast pace. In an interview with Peter Bow Danovitch, Hitchcock once commented, "What I liked about The 39 Steps were the sudden switches and the jumping from one situation to another with such rapidity. Donat leaping out of the window of the police station with half of a handcuff on, and immediately walking into a Salvation Army band, darting down an alleyway into a room. 'Thank God you've come, Mr. so-and-so' they say and put him on to a platform. A girl comes along with two men, takes him into a car to the police station, but it's not really to the police station.... You know the rapidity of the switches, that's the great thing about it. If I did The 39 Steps again, I would stick to the formula, but it really takes a lot of work. You have to use one idea after another, and with such rapidity." The film is rich in details and that indescribable sense of the macabre.

One of the film's major motifs is the confining, sexually-frustrating institution of marriage. There are three married couples in the film that provide the commentary: Margaret and her abusive husband John, Professor and Mrs. Jordan, and the innkeepers who encourage romance. The film's two MacGuffins are the nature of the 39 Steps and the smuggling of secret plans out of the country - the mystery of which is only fully revealed in the final scene.

The 39 Steps - Cast & Crew

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