#665: The 39 Steps
Spy thriller a big step forward for Hitchcock
Initial release: June 6, 1935
Director: Alfred Hitchcock
Spy fiction is a relatively very young genre, only reaching its fullest form in the lead-up to the Great War, sitting as it did in the context of the geopolitical machinations of the world powers with their often inscrutable motivations and goals, and a growing simmer of revolution and anarchist fervor. It was during the first year of World War I that John Buchan would write The Thirty-Nine Steps, an early entry into the modern spy fiction genre at a time when global espionage was at an all-time high. The story goes something like this: Richard Hannay is just an ordinary guy who, almost by accident, gets swept up in a sinister foreign plot, is accused of murder, and must go on the run to clear his own name and stop the spy ring. While there have been several adaptations, it was Alfred Hitchcock’s that set the standard for the rest, and indeed, set a standard for Hitchcock’s own filmmaking going forward.
While The 39 Steps follows closely the plot of the novel, a few things are changed, most inconsequential (such as changing the name of the spy ring to “The 39 Steps” from its original moniker of “The Black Stone,”) but one quite important: rather than 1914, as in the original novel, Hitchcock moves the action to the context of 1930s Europe, with the Second World War just around the corner. Despite this clear historical change to reflect the British national mood of 1935, Hitchcock’s take on the story is curiously devoid of any overt political connection. With the spy ring’s change of name comes its disconnection from Germany; no reference at all to Germany or any other potential enemy state is made — only “foreign agents” who seek to take sensitive information “out of the country.” Why this change was made, especially with the obvious jitters around Big Two’s impending arrival, is unclear — perhaps Gaumont, the film’s distributor at the time, wished to sell the film in the Nazi German market like many Hollywood studios continued to do almost up to the outbreak of the war.
Nevertheless, The 39 Steps is classically Hitchcockian, possessed of several of the classic marks of a Hitchcock film: a cameo by the director himself (he’s the guy littering as he walks by an arriving bus); a protagonist who spends much of the film on the run (a plot that Hitchcock returned to repeatedly throughout his career); and of course the trademark Hitchcock Blondes, frigid and gorgeous.
Hitchcock’s film is suffuse with some truly incredible cinematography for 1935; it often feels ahead of its time. One example is in a gorgeous establishing shot for London, in which the camera is mounted on the back of a vehicle and tracks the traffic amidst the London nightlife; it’s surprisingly dynamic for the era and I think a good example, however perceptually minor, of Hitchcock’s innovative sense.
Robert Donat is the protagonist of this film, as Richard Hannay; while Donat was English, here he plays Hannay as necessarily Canadian, intended to appeal to American audiences; indeed, his Hannay is played pretty loosely, even quippy, feeling much more (North-)American and very much un-British in affect, nevermind his crap Canadian accent. Lucie Mannheim has a brief role as the intensely paranoid counterspy Annabella Smith; the primary female role, however, goes to Madeleine Carroll as Pamela, and she is just about perfect as the archetypal Hitchcock blonde.
If you like spy movies, you could do worse than to see The 39 Steps; I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say that 90 years of spy movies all lay at the feet of one of Hitchcock’s best pre-Hollywood flicks.
