“Beautiful, mysterious woman pursued by gunmen. Sounds like a spy story.”
A culmination of Alfred Hitchcock’s early British period, The 39 Steps is a breezy, highly entertaining mistaken identity thriller that set down the template for numerous of the director’s later films, such as Young and Innocent, Saboteur, and North by Northwest. Featuring a jarring murder (Lucie Mannheim), a mysterious blonde woman (Madeleine Carroll), an innocent everyman on the lam (Robert Donat), a sinister villain (Godfrey Tearle), and a titanic Macguffin, it boils the Hitchcock thriller down to its essentials and dresses them up with creative camera angles, nifty insert shots (that recall the director’s origins in silent film), jaunty dialogue, and a blur of distinct locales (a rowdy music hall, a train, a political rally, a small farm, an inn, the London Palladium).
Like the previous year’s The Man Who Knew Too Much (1934), it hits the ground running and never looks back, quickly roping its unwitting protagonist into the world of espionage and then constantly shifting its narrative emphases and pace alongside the hunted man’s (and the audience’s) evolving knowledge. As the fugitive works tirelessly and improvisationally to clear his name, he must take on a number of different guises in order to avoid detection, posing as a mechanic, a milkman, a politician, and a newlywed in order to conceal his identity. Oh, and I almost forgot to mention that he spends a large portion of the film handcuffed to his icy love interest, which gives a few later sequences the witty charm of a screwball comedy. Among the role players are an immoral milkman (Frederick Piper), a sheriff (Frank Cellier), a showman who performs feats of memory (Wylie Watson), and a trio of married couples—the crofters (John Laurie, Peggy Ashcroft), the innkeepers, and the villain and his wife (Helen Haye).
If one is looking clear examples of Hitchcock’s playfulness and ingenuity, look no further than an early scene transition when the maid discovers the murdered woman and opens her mouth to scream, and we jump to the fleeing suspect aboard a train that is emitting a high-pitched whistle. It’s brilliant touches like that one which characterize The 39 Steps and speak to the filmmaker’s craftsmanship, from the composition of images to the precise timing of each cut. Hollywood saw it too, and a lucrative contract soon lured Hitchcock to America, where he would produce a generous handful of all-time classics.