The 39 Steps

Few films, regardless of their artistic value, seem fresh and undated ten or fifteen years after their release. The 39 Steps is one that escapes the outmoding action of time. No new techniques applied to more recent pictures makes The 39 Steps "old" by comparison. Alfred Hitchcock was in 1935, as he is now, the master of the suspense movie, and his methods have been improved by no one.

Hitchcock's success lies in his ability to subtly interweave two worlds. In The 39 Steps the mysterious and ominous world of spies is left half explicit, and is always connected with and expressed through the real world of buses, telephones and ordinary people. The movie creates an everyday reality the audience knows. It then allows something foreign, unusual, horrible to enter that reality, but the horrible is never tangible, never fully explained. The audience is allowed an impression of something alien and frightening, and that something is never clearly defined.

The opening scene, for example, is set in a music hall. The action is at first perfectly normal: entertainers entertain, spectators jostle each other, a rowdy is ejected and everyone cranes his neck to see what is going on. Everything is straightforward and familiar. Suddenly the camera focuses on a hand holding a gun, two shots ring out, and a sense of the mysterious unknown is introduced. It is successful because it is intangible, because it is no more than an impression of something alien and frightening suddenly introduced into a perfectly ordinary situation.

Touches of this sort fill the movie. Salesmen discuss the mysterious murder in the same breath with routine conversation about their product. A line of dancers at the Palladium goes through its act while a man lies dying. Always, terror intrudes in normal circumstances; this is the essence of Hitchcock's technique, and with the steady acting of Robert Donat and Madeleine Carroll plus fine photography, this essence makes The 39 Steps a memorable film event.

A sub-par UPA cartoon about a horse and an iceman who conquer technological unemployment by going machine age, a Russian travelogue, and a British Information Services film about buses and stately homes round out the program, but add little more than symmetry.