This wonderful film works on so many levels: spies, suspense, the chase and as a romance of a man and woman poles apart. In addition to these standard elements of film, it is also a capsule of a time and place: England in the mid-thirties, showing us the average music hall and then the London Palladium on "Crazy Night." I am not English, nor was I alive then, but this IS what a music hall must have looked like with its hecklers, drinkers and smokers filling the air with their haze.
Then we have the two intrepid traveling salesmen on the train, going to Aberdeen to flog their wares. Hitch used Wayne and Radford to great effect in 'Lady Vanishes', but here I love their topical remarks about the BBC of the time.
And whatever is that contraption used by the police in Scotland to hunt from the air. Did King Wesley lend them his auto-gyro from "One Night?"
Donat and Carroll are another of those wonderful couples: Bogart and Hepburn, Finney and the other Hepburn, and Gable and Colbert,whose American comedy hit the screen the year before. Their night together compares favorably to G & C's in the motor camp in "One Night" but they have no 'wall of Jericho' between them.
Hitch's goal was to unite the bickering twosome, but he frames the story with a chase of an innocent man, and within the hunt are smaller chases that bring out so many wonderful touches. There is the dining car steward so anxious to sit Donat for tea as the police chase him through the train. A few seconds earlier there was that gasp of amazement from us as Carroll denounces her seeming 'husband' embraced about her in her train compartment, which sends Donat out the door in a hurry.
But none compare to the five to ten minutes after Donat breaks away from the police in Scotland. Seeing police everywhere, he takes up with the temperance band, marching to some meeting, but he leaves them to duck inside a door only to find himself thought to be a speaker at a political rally. Oh, how wonderful he is, thinking on his feet up on that stage, transposing the name of the candidate into McCrocodile and earning the cheers of the audience. Sometimes when you watch a film, you wonder if another writer/director borrowed an idea from the present. How similar that meeting is to the one in Third Man when Holly is dragged off to the literary soirée.
39 Steps was the best film of 1935, and while the sound is poor in parts and in parts the print grainy, I will never throw my copy away, especially when it opens by telling me that the movie met the approval of the Board of Censors of Great Britain and the Irish Free State.
Then we have the two intrepid traveling salesmen on the train, going to Aberdeen to flog their wares. Hitch used Wayne and Radford to great effect in 'Lady Vanishes', but here I love their topical remarks about the BBC of the time.
And whatever is that contraption used by the police in Scotland to hunt from the air. Did King Wesley lend them his auto-gyro from "One Night?"
Donat and Carroll are another of those wonderful couples: Bogart and Hepburn, Finney and the other Hepburn, and Gable and Colbert,whose American comedy hit the screen the year before. Their night together compares favorably to G & C's in the motor camp in "One Night" but they have no 'wall of Jericho' between them.
Hitch's goal was to unite the bickering twosome, but he frames the story with a chase of an innocent man, and within the hunt are smaller chases that bring out so many wonderful touches. There is the dining car steward so anxious to sit Donat for tea as the police chase him through the train. A few seconds earlier there was that gasp of amazement from us as Carroll denounces her seeming 'husband' embraced about her in her train compartment, which sends Donat out the door in a hurry.
But none compare to the five to ten minutes after Donat breaks away from the police in Scotland. Seeing police everywhere, he takes up with the temperance band, marching to some meeting, but he leaves them to duck inside a door only to find himself thought to be a speaker at a political rally. Oh, how wonderful he is, thinking on his feet up on that stage, transposing the name of the candidate into McCrocodile and earning the cheers of the audience. Sometimes when you watch a film, you wonder if another writer/director borrowed an idea from the present. How similar that meeting is to the one in Third Man when Holly is dragged off to the literary soirée.
39 Steps was the best film of 1935, and while the sound is poor in parts and in parts the print grainy, I will never throw my copy away, especially when it opens by telling me that the movie met the approval of the Board of Censors of Great Britain and the Irish Free State.