By Scott Ross
Professor: Well, Mr. Hannay, I’m afraid I’ve been guilty of leading you down the garden path – or should it be up? I never can remember.
Hannay: It seems to be the wrong garden, all right.
Earlier this year while writing about North by Northwest I remembered that it was not, as I had thought, the first Alfred Hitchcock movie I ever saw. That honor fell, appropriately enough, to this one, viewed with great pleasure at a local library screening a couple of years earlier. Appropriate because, seeing The 39 Steps again for the first time in what I shudder slightly to realize is nearly a half-century I think I understand why I got confused: North by Northwest, wonderful as it is and as relatively uncluttered by the director’s more intrusive visual flourishes, is virtually an American version of his most quintessential and enjoyable British picture.
All the tropes are there, courtesy both of Hitchcock and his scenarist Charles Bennett as well as, to a lesser extent, the 1915 John Buchan spy thriller on which the screenplay was based: The man alone, accused of a murder he did not commit (and one strikingly similar to the killing that puts Cary Grant on the run in NxNW); the cool blonde he meets on a train and with whom he enjoys a rocky relationship (she’s definitely not in the book); the foreign agents who must be thwarted if the hero is to prove his innocence and prevent some vague but terrible thing from happening; the smooth, urbane, friendly-seeming head villain; the chase across a continent (or continents, since in The 39 Steps the protagonist goes from England to Scotland and back again); the scene in which the “wrong man” causes a disturbance in order to thwart the espionage plot and take the heat off himself. There’s even a flying machine over the hero’s head — although not, as in NxNW, a deadly one. For North by Northwest, Hitchcock and his gifted screenwriter Ernest Lehman reconfigured these strands, and filtered them through an American perspective; the later picture is not (odious word) a “remake” of The 39 Steps so much as a most enjoyable variation on it.
There is so much pleasure contained in The 39 Steps (as there is in North by Northwest) that you may only gradually become aware while watching it how perfectly shaped and realized every sequence in it is, and how in command of the material and visual impact the filmmaker is without, as he so often did later, calling attention to himself while claiming he wasn’t. It’s a sign either of arrogance or of desperation when a director sets up elaborate crane shots and swooping cameras for their own sake; when your material is as strong as it is in a picture like The 39 Steps, you don’t, as Orson Welles remarked of John Ford, have to bang around. I hadn’t, as I said, seen the movie since I was 12 or 13 but I still remembered Peggy Ashcroft as the crofter’s anxious wife; Robert Donat trying to escape the police by hiding on the stage of a political rally and then having to pretend he’s the guest lecturer (exactly the opposite of Cary Grant in NxNW making an obnoxious public spectacle of himself so the cops will arrest him); Donat handcuffed to Madeleine Carroll on the moors; the fatal shooting that isn’t*; Mr. Memory on the stage of the Palladium; the man with the missing pinky finger… None of these moments would have taxed the most rudimentarily trained director’s resources, yet if they do not shriek, “Look at me and my camera!” they do speak, in their casual artistry, of Hitchcock’s early mastery of form: The sequence in which Donat, standing with his back to a pylon of the Forth Rail Bridge on which he is hiding from police detectives, looks down at the water far, far below, for example, triggers my increasing acrophobia to a nearly swoon-inducing extent. There is more to admire in the way Hitchcock handles the picture’s final moments, with the high-kicking chorus framing the main action in front of it and the camera slowly dollying in on Donat’s and Carroll’s backs as their hands find each other, than in the whole of The Birds.
I’ve watched Donat in a handful of pictures and he never registers with me — indeed he often causes my teeth to ache; the scenes of Mr. Chipping’s senescence during Donat’s Oscar-conferred performance in Goodbye, Mr. Chips are among the hammiest goddamned things I’ve ever seen. So I was happily surprised to rediscover how effective he is as Richard Hannay, Buchan’s protagonist. By no means as good-looking as Cary Grant (who was?) nor as charming (not even Cary Grant was, at least in life) Donat here has an easygoing quality that ought to make it clear to anyone how innocent Hannay is, and how unthreatening. But it doesn’t help; the situation is both so incriminating and so absurd it can only really exist in the topsy-turvy world of the thriller based on surface circumstance. Donat is wonderfully funny at times, such as in the long sequence at the country inn when he’s prattling on about his imagined childhood as an apprentice murderer, a Hitchockian reverie if ever there was one. Perhaps the nicest surprise in The 39 Steps is when Hannay, running from the detectives on the train, slips into Carroll’s compartment and kisses her as if they’re lovers and she’s been waiting for him; he’s sure she won’t give him away, but she does, smiling haughtily at him as she tells the cops he’s lying, and in a way that says, “See? You oughtn’t to be so smug. For all I know you are a killer.” Contrast with this the ease with which Grant gets Eva Marie Saint to cover for him and the delighted laugh you get from Carroll’s smirking betrayal of Donat is liable to be twice as big.†
There is barely a sequence, an action, a line of dialogue or a moment in The Thirty-Nine Steps that doesn’t engage, enthrall or delight. Even the less pleasant bits, such as when after aiding Hannay the crofter’s wife is physically attacked by her sour Calvinist husband, are handled with assurance, if not with any sense of reassurance; her scream, and what we assume is the beginning of a beating, occur off-screen. When in North by Northwest the U.N. diplomat is killed by a thrown knife and falls into Cary Grant’s arms we don’t feel anything for him because we don’t know him, whereas the woman (Lucie Mannheim) who is murdered in Hannay’s flat we, and he, have gotten to know, and to understand is concerned for her life; we have an emotional connection to the knifing victim absent in the later picture. Her death also confirms her assertion that the shadowy “39 Steps” organization exists, and is as dangerous as she claims. There is one bit of obvious technical manipulation by Hitchcock (the cleaning woman’s silent scream heard on the soundtrack as a shrill whistle when he cuts to the train station) that is almost too much, but it’s so witty you can’t help smiling.
It’s often difficult in talkies of the first decade to know who did what on the scenario. The screenplay is credited to Charles Bennett, but Ian Hay is listed as the dialogue writer. (Such bifurcation was not unusual at the time, although in this case I believe Hay contributed what used to be called “additional dialogue.”) I’m not sure who is responsible for the effervescent verbal exchanges, which reach their apogee in the Donat/Carroll scenes where their constant languid sniping at each other has the Cowardian sparkle of Private Lives. As always with Hitchcock, the director himself may have come up with some of the lines, as he almost certainly devised the scene at the inn where Madeline Carroll has to roll down her wet stockings while handcuffed to Donat, one of the most deliciously sexy moments in 1930s cinema. The censorship in Britain at the time was not as stringent as it had recently become in America when the Production Code came into strict enforcement, but The Thirty-Nine Steps gets away with so much risqué material it’s almost shocking. The entire inn sequence is an unalloyed beguilement, topped by the charming Hilda Trevelyan as the innkeeper’s wife, expressing her delight at what she thinks are two clandestine unmarried lovers sharing one of her rooms.
The movie is beautifully shot by Bernard Knowles and buoyed by Derek N. Twist’s lively editing which, like Hitchcock’s direction, propels the narrative at an almost breakneck speed yet pauses now and again for an amusing sequence (the commercial travelers commenting on a new model of brassiere is a good example) or some offhand line that cheers you. The Thirty-Nine Steps is, pound for pound, among the half-dozen or so most skillfully diverting and completely satisfying movies of its kind ever made. (Robert Towne: “It’s not much of an exaggeration to say that all contemporary escapist entertainment begins with The Thirty-Nine Steps.“) From an audience perspective Richard Hannay may be up the wrong path, but the garden surrounding him is marvelously right.
*Another sequence to which Lehman and Hitchcock nod in North by Northwest, when Eva Marie Saint appears to murder Cary Grant in the Mt. Rushmore cafeteria.
†And yes, I am aware that the Saint character knows very well Grant is not dangerous, and that he’s been mistaken for a man who doesn’t exist. At that point in the picture, we don’t know she knows.
So few critics, so many poets 