The 39 Steps (1935) Director: Alfred Hitchcock
“Have you ever heard of the 39 steps?”
★★★★★
Very loosely based on John Buchan’s adventure novel of the same name, in The 39 Steps an ordinary Canadian civilian named Richard Hannay (Robert Donat) watches a London performance of a wondrous “memory man” named Mr. Memory, a man who commits fifty new facts to memory each day. He can recall any fact upon request by the audience (and he has pledged to donate his brain to the British Museum in the future –a promise which garners applause). Mr. Memory rattles off a variety of silly unimportant facts in response to an increasingly unruly audience. Suddenly, chaos ensues and gunshots are fired. In the scramble, Mr. Hannay finds himself helping an alarmed woman named Annabella Smith (Lucie Mannheim) as she weaves her way through the crowd. She then asks to go home with him and upon arrival, she explains to Hannay that she is secretly a spy and there are two men following her –she begs him not to answer the phone. It was actually she who fired the gunshots in the theatre as a diversion. She claims to be saving an important state secret which is vital to the air defenses of England. Why? Not because she cares much for England, but because the job will pay better. She describes a mysterious enemy mastermind attempting to steal this secret, who can be recognized by the missing tip of his pinky finger. In the middle of the night, Hannay discovers that Annabella has been murdered, stabbed to death. In the morning, an old lady discovers the body and her scream is overlaid with the shrieking sound of a train whistle. Hannay then takes her map and steals a milkman’s outfit in narrowly escaping his own apartment with two men on his trail. It is an explosive start to a brilliant espionage story, using Hitchcock’s classic motif of an average everyman who becomes embroiled in an extraordinary situation a la North by Northwest and Foreign Correspondent, although one interesting point of note is that Mr. Hannay is actually Canadian and Annabella’s accent shows her to be quite clearly German (though she claims to “have no country”) –neither of these characters are driven by patriotic devotion to England. As with many of his films, Hitchcock resists making a propagandistic jingoistic pro-England movie. In fact, there is often a subtle critique of England in Hitchcock’s films.
At any rate, Hannay –now wrongly accused of a crime– is chased by the police and flees to Scotland by train (aboard the “Flying Scotsman”) where he accidentally meets a woman named Pamela (Madeleine Carroll), however he is forced to hop off the train and run on foot through the Scottish countryside, desperate to escape from the police who believe him to be a murderer, all the while searching for the Scottish destination on Annabella’s map. Following a tense autogyro chase (which is a prelude to North by Northwest), and an overnight stay at a farm where a domineering, jealous, pious husband rules the roost over his much younger wife, Hannay (who disguises himself under the name “Hammond”) escapes with the farmer’s coat and winds up at a secretive Scottish residence owned by Professor Jordan (Godfrey Tearle). Hannay initially believes Jordan to be a friend, however he soon learns Jordan is a foreign spy (suspiciously missing his pinky finger, just as Annabella described). Jordan offers Hannay the chance to kill himself, but when Hannay does not respond, Jordan shoots him anyway.
However, in a twist, the bullet does not kill Hannay –it was blocked by a book of hymns concealed inside the farmer’s coat he stole. When he manages to escape, Hannay goes straight to police (“I’m not surprised, Mr. Hannay, some of those hymns are terribly hard to get through!”) This leads to a wild chase as the police once again attempt to arrest Hannay. He leaps out a window, and hides in an assembly hall where an important political meeting is unfolding, but he is mistaken for the nominee and he is compelled to deliver a rousing political speech of a vision where nation does not rise against nation any longer. Suddenly, Hannay and Pamela are reunited and they wind up handcuffed together by agents of Professor Jordan (their unmarried sexual attraction contains plenty of nods to the prior year’s classic Best Picture-winner, It Happened One Night). Indeed, a pre-code movie, The 39 Steps is rife with innuendo and bawdy humor (consider the two silly British gentlemen aboard the train discussing the merits of modern brassieres). Continuing Hitchcock’s frequent bemused satire of the British gentlemanly class, The 39 Steps portrays a picaresque panorama of different marriages –from laughable infidelities, petty insecurities, and culturally polite secrets, including both working class and high brow situations, as well as a stern religious Scotsmen named John (John Laurie) who is extremely controlling of his young wife Margaret (Peggy Ashcroft).
At any rate, now chained together, Hannay and Pamela escape across the moors to a remote inn before attending another performance of Mr. Memory at the London Palladium. In this way, the film ends where it all began. During the performance, Mr. Hannay connects the dots and he shouts at Mr. Memory “what are the 39 steps?” But before Mr. Memory can complete his response –“The Thirty-Nine Steps is an organization of spies, collecting information on behalf of the foreign office of…” he is shot and the name of the country remains unknown. Shortly before dying, Mr. Memory recounts the detailed schematics of a silent aircraft (the twist contains echoes of the musical code MacGuffin employed in Hitchcock’s The Lady Vanishes). The film is notably bookended by a curtain rise and fall. Whereas Hitchcock initially began The 39 Steps with a scene wherein we are comfortably seated in the audience of a performance by Mr. Memory, by the end of the film we have been transported backstage as the curtain falls –Hitchcock has revealed to us a secret while playfully transforming the audience from the role of mere spectators into backstage parties to this wild thrill ride before reminding us this was all a performance in the end.
In The 39 Steps, across Hannay’s four-day adventure, there exists palpable tension between the general public, the hordes of distracted masses hungry for entertainment, and the shadowy dangerous world of international espionage hiding in plain sight. The hero in this story takes a firm stand against secrecy, hoping to expose a secret code as a public service. In that sense, this is an optimistic movie, in praise of an open society, a reaffirmation of the international liberal democratic order, but it also is an extraordinarily metatextual film. All the characters seem to be fully aware that they are living inside a spy thriller (or a “spy story”). With The 39 Steps, Hitchcock presents a unique commentary on the medium of escapist entertainment, wherein the nature of truth and lies are rigorously examined. Released in 1935, Hitchcock may have been offering a coded message of his own –a cautionary warning about the rising appeal of fascism, as the militant movement of “black shirts” (hailed at the time by The Daily Mail) posed a threat to many people, especially Jews, Reds, capitalists, and liberal democracy.
Lastly, I find myself particularly drawn to Hitchcock’s satire and commentary on the institution of marriage which is subtly examined in several instances throughout this film. For example, when Hannay assumes his first disguise as a Milk Man. In this case, the real Milk Man refuses to help Hannay because he does not believe the story about international espionage, but he then changes his mind when Hannay fabricates a lie about sleeping with a married woman (“Why didn’t you tell me before, old fellow? I was just wanting to be told. Trying to keep me with a lot of tales about murderers and foreigners”). It is yet another instance in the film wherein the public prefers lies and distractions to the unpleasant truth of an espionage conspiracy. However, this comical little Milk Man scene merely reveals one man’s view of marriage and the need to protect the secrecy of infidelities. Another amusing moment comes with the two British gentlemen discussing undergarments –one turns away in disgust at the thought of his wife wearing one. And there are three other marriages offered for our consideration in the film: the abusive, tyrannical crofter John and his young timid wife Margaret (notably, Margaret attempts to keep a secret from her husband by helping Hannay escape), the Professor Jordan and his wife (notably, she enters the room while the professor has a gun pointed at Hannay, indicating that these spouses do not keep secrets from one another), and the innkeepers who encourage the romance of Hannay and Pamela (of the three marriages, they seem to be the most in love). Perhaps there are some places where secrets and lies are necessary –such as Hannay lying about his identity– while there are other places where openness and honesty are required, such as between spouses or Hannay revealing a covert intelligence operation which threatens the future of the nation.
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Credits:
- Director: Alfred Hitchcock
- Screenplay: Charles Bennett and Ian Hay
- Based on: The Thirty-Nine Steps, a 1915 novel by John Buchan
- Produced by: Michael Balcon
- Starring:
- Robert Donat…..Richard Hannay
- Madeleine Carroll…..Pamela
- Lucie Mannheim…..Annabella Smith
- Godfrey Tearle…..Professor Jordan
- Cinematography: Bernard Knowles
- Edited by: Derek N. Twist
- Music by: Louis Levy and Jack Beaver (uncredited)
- Production Company: Gaumont-British Picture Corporation
- Distributed by: Gaumont British Distributors
Other Notes:
- Hitchcock Cameo: At around seven minutes into the film, both Hitchcock and screenwriter Charles Bennett can be seen walking past a bus that Robert Donat and Lucie Mannheim board outside the music hall. The bus is on London Transport’s number 25A route, which ran from Oxford Street through the East End and on to Ilford. As the bus pulls up he litters by throwing a cigarette packet on the ground. Hitchcock can also be seen briefly as a member of the audience scrambling to leave the music hall after the shot is fired in the opening scene.