The 39 Steps

Time was British films didn't play in America. The first cross-Atlantic hit was Alfred Hitchcock's The 39 Steps, which also illustrates three of Hitchcock's major tropes: the McGuffin, the wrongly accused man, and the icy blonde.

From 1935, The 39 Steps stars Robert Donat as an average man (we're not even told what he does for a living) who meets a mysterious woman at a music hall show. She comes up to his apartment, and we are led to believe she's a woman of easy virtue. But, she tells Donat, she is a spy, and some important information may be leaving the country. She ends up with a knife in her back, clutching a map of Scotland, and Donat is on the run, suspected of her murder.

There are many parallels with Hitchcock's later masterpiece, North by Northwest. Donat escapes on a train to Scotland, where he hopes to find the woman's contact. To avoid detection, he enters the compartment of a woman (Madeleine Carroll) and kisses her. But she turns him in, and he escapes by climbing out on the Forth Bridge. Eventually he finds who he thinks is the good guy, but he's wrong, and he's on the run again.

The McGuffin was the term Hitchcock used for the thing that the characters are interested in but is irrelevant to the audience (in this case it's design elements for an aircraft engine). The audience need not know that--we're just interested in the chase. A large percentage of this film is Donat running--in one scene, across the Scottish moors, Hitchcock increases the speed of the film, so it looks like the Keystone Cops are chasing him. In fact, Donat escapes from some places too easily, but Hitchcock was not interested in plausibility. If a film has plausibility, he said, it's a documentary.

Carroll will shop up later in the film and identify Donat as the fugitive. She ends up handcuffed to him and they are eluding spies in the dark and fog in Scotland. Eventually she will believe his story, but before that she is cold and angry (as would anyone, I expect). Though this film passed the British Censorship Board, it does break some rules, such as showing Carroll's bare legs as she removes her stockings (and Donat touching those legs) and the two of them lying in the same bed together (they have to--they're handcuffed, you see). Hitchcock was always tricky about using sex in amusing ways, which would lead to his most famous shot of it, the train going into the tunnel in North by Northwest.

The 39 Steps is a fun film, and I especially liked being tricked. Hitchcock opens the film with a scene in the Music Hall with a performer called Mr. Memory, who can remember a vast amount of facts. We, or at least I, didn't expect to see him again, but he turns out to be a key part of the plot. Just goes to show that Hitchcock, more than any other director, knew how to manipulate an audience to his advantage.