The 39 Steps

(1935)
An early Hitchcock film, I added this to my queue while I was on a Criterion Collection spree. Its stretching it, maybe, to think there are movies you should see, but all Criterion films are chosen for a reason, and most of them have at least something to offer the modern viewer. 39 Steps concerns itself with Richard Hannay (Robert Donat), a Canadian visiting London who attends a show featuring Mr. Memory (Wylie Watson), a man who has an astonishing number of facts memorized and can answer even the most trivial of questions. When shots are fired the audience scatters, but not before Hannay encounters Annabella Smith (Lucie Mannheim), a remarkably modern woman who invites herself into his flat. She acts almost paranoid once inside, and she tells Hannay that shes being tailed by foreign agents (their nationality is never disclosed, but its 1935, do the math); an especially sinister agent missing the top digit of his pinkie hand is going to smuggle something secret out of the country, and Smith has to try to stop him. Hannay allows her to spend the night so she can get a fresh start in the morning, but she is murdered, and he is implicated. Now hes on the run not only from a false murder charge, but hes the only one who knows of this enemy agent. He flees to Scotland, evading the law only narrowly, and follows the only lead Smith left him, the name of a Scottish town, when he walks straight into the hands of the enemy agent himself. The movie starts off a little slowly, and the scenes with Hannay and Smith dont feel quite right, somehow. Once Hannay is off on the run the movie picks up, a sort of pre-war Bourne flick, and as we hurtle toward the conclusion the film gets tighter and better. Donat engages our sympathy as Hannay, confused at first as he is the object of an intense search, but his clever improvisations out of tight situations gains our respect quickly. Godfrey Tearle plays the enemy agent perfectly, acting more like a man put out by being discovered than a sinister thug; its easy to believe hes been living undercover for some years. The whole affair feels entirely realistic, as opposed to the bombastic way this film would no doubt be made today. Part of the appeal for me is that the film takes place in a different world, some eighty years ago, where houses didnt have phones and most people didnt even own cars (though I tsked at the way newspaper information seems to travel more quickly than Hannay himself, which seems unlikely); the taut storytelling and the danger Hannay finds himself in still resonate, and his relationship later in the film with a train passenger, Pamela (Madeleine Carroll) who betrays him to the police, only to learn of his innocence later, really draw the viewer in (the best scene in the movie comes when Hannay, still eluding police, finds himself in the unlikely position of introducing a political speaker at a small indoor rally; his quick thinking and clever speech off the top of his head reinforce our acceptance that this guy could elude pursuit for so long). Im not the biggest Hitchcock fan Ive nothing against him, Im just mostly unfamiliar with his early work but this is a very strong film that, even decades later, holds up remarkably well.

May 12, 2013