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The Thirty-Nine Steps The novel The Thirty-Nine Steps is a modern classic of the espionage and thriller genre and the movie The 39 Steps is a great Hitchcock film, also a classic of the espionage and thriller genre. Yet this first of three major film adaptations is nothing like the book. The main character played by Robert Donat (Goodbye, Mr. Chips) is still named Richard Hannay and he still goes on the lam in Scotland from both foreign spies and police who think he's murdered someone in London, just as in the book. But that's about the extent of the similarity between film and book. In John Buchan's novel, Hannay had made his fortune in Rhodesia (Zimbabwe during colonial times) and is staying in England when a man in his building named Scudder tells him about an anarchist conspiracy to start war in the Balkans, this being just before the First World War. Scudder's murder leads to Hannay's flight, and he spends most of the novel playing cat and mouse with his pursuers in the highlands before he gets a government bigwig on his side and solves the mystery that has something to do with "thirty-nine steps". Hitchcock's film however starts with gunfire during a mentalist act by a performer called Mr. Memory. Hannay is a visiting Canadian now who takes home from the curtailed performance a mysterious woman, a Miss Annabella Smith, who reveals a Nazi plot to steal top-secret papers from Britain, this being before the Second World War. Her murder sends him scampering for his own life in Scotland where he is helped by two other women, one of whom, played by blond-bombshell Madeleine Carroll, he manages to get himself handcuffed to—leading to humourous and romantic complications. In the end, Hannay returns to London and Mr. Memory to find a solution to the mystery that is altogether different from that of the book—entirely changing the significance of the title. No wonder the film's title (The 39 Steps) is spelled differently, using numerals instead of words. All of which is to say, forget the book. This is a fun old movie. Somewhat dated of course, but Hitchcock knew what would make terrific drama for the audience of his time in his first great suspense thriller. He would make Secret Agent (again with Carroll as the female lead) the next year and then Sabotage and The Lady Vanishes, among others, over the following three years, all in Britain before moving to Hollywood and making his most famous films. The film was remade more than two decades later, with Mr. Memory and many of the same plot elements that Hitchcock's writers had created. In the 1959 Thirty-Nine Steps, Hannay, played by dependable British actor Kenneth More, is pulled into the plot by the murder of a nanny whom he has met in the park and who has vital national secrets. I haven't seen this version and it doesn't appear to be readily available on video, but fans and critics seems to be evenly split on whether it's a step up or step down from the 1935 film, as it's very similar. Some think the fact that this version shows Scotland in colour, compared to the black and white of Hitchcock's version, is enough of an improvement to recommend it. For verisimilitude with the book, you apparently have to go the 1978 movie, the third made-in-the-UK production, which is hard to find today. Hannay, portrayed ably by Robert Powell, is from the African colonies, the time is pre-WWI, the murdered man is Scudder, there is no Mr. Memory, and there are no women trying to seduce our hero or get themselves otherwise hitched to him. The plot of this Thirty-Nine Steps pretty well follows the Buchan novel, except for a thrilling finale atop Big Ben. David Warner is a delicious villain, as always. Until the finale though, this film is somewhat dull. Perhaps Hitchcock had known what he was doing when he replaced the Buchan story with more dramatic material. Powell went on to portray the continuing escapades of the same character in a 13-episode series for British TV in 1988, called simply Hannay. Rather stagy, Masterpiece-Theatre kind of productions. The Three Hostages, one of Buchan's sequels to The Thirty-Nine Steps, was filmed in 1977 for British TV with Barry Foster as Hannay and Diana Quick as his wife. By the way, if that scene on England's Big Ben in the 1978 Thirty-Nine Steps reminds you of another Hitchcock film, North by Northwest (1959), in which the hero nearly ends up being pushed off that American monument, Mount Rushmore, it may not be accidental. Despite returning The Thirty-Nine Steps to the original novel, the 1978 film has several elements that pay homage to Hitchcock. Moreover, North by Northwest is considered by some to be Hitchcock's own remake of The Thirty-Nine Steps. An innocent man flees by train and on foot across the Midwest (the U.S. equivalent to the Scottish Highlands in the U.K.), pursued by both spies and government agents who think he's a killer. I don't think so. But whether or not we count North by Northwest as an adaptation of The Thirty-Nine Steps, the similarity of its plot at least shows the great influence Buchan's slender novel has had on the thriller and suspense genre. You can probably find twenty or thirty movies with this general storyline throughout the history of cinema right up to the present time. — Eric |
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