Richard Hannay (Donat) stumbles upon a conspiracy that thrusts him into a hectic chase across the Scottish moors – a chase in which he is both the pursuer and the pursued – as well as into an unexpected romance with the cool Pamela (Carroll).
- Based on the novel The Thirty-Nine Steps by John Buchan.
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When looking for classic films, director Alfred Hitchcock immediately springs to mind. While I’d seen Psycho and The Birds before, those were the only Hitchcock films I’d ever seen, so wanted to see something else he had to offer. I was looking for Vertigo, but ran across another film instead: The 39 Steps. Since the film is nearly 90 years old, I was eager to see if it would still be worth watching today.
Robert Donat leads the cast in The 39 Steps, and does a pretty good job. While it takes a while for the viewer to warm up to his character (since he really has no back story), he’s still entertaining, and manages to draw the viewer in. The rest of the cast is pretty good as well, with none of the overacting seen other classic films (like Planet of the Apes).
The story is gripping, despite being such an old tale. A man meets a strange woman claiming to be a spy. He doesn’t believe her, but when she is murdered, he changes his mind. So begins a rush across the British country to Scotland, where he hopes to unravel the plot against her and clear his name. While The 39 Steps is mostly a chase movie, it has a bit of a race-against-time element to it as well. Thanks to a brisk pace (which classic movies are usually not known for), with action sequences sprinkled throughout, it provides for lots of excitement for the viewers – and a reason to keep them sticking around until the end.
The action is very tame by today’s standards (with punches that don’t look like they hurt and the like), but they lend themselves to the film quite well. Unlike the action hero born in the films of the 80’s, this central character is not a fighter, and only does what he needs to in order to survive. And that’s pretty minimal, as usually he’s trying to escape, not duke it out with the bad guys.
While I was skeptical about whether this film (which is not one of Alfred Hitchcock’s more famous films) could hold up to the films of today, I was pleasantly surprised. With a solid story, a quicker pace than most classic movies have, and a compelling everyman for a main character, viewers will want to stick around to find out what The 39 Steps actually are – and that’s darn impressive for a film just shy of it’s 90th birthday.
