THE BRITISH FILM GUIDES

The celebrated film director François Truffaut once famously observed that
there was a certain incompatibility between the terms British and cinema.
That was typical of the critical disparagement for so long suffered by British
films. As late as  a respected film scholar could dub British cinema ‘the
unknown cinema’. This was the situation because up to that time the critics,
scholars and intellectuals writing about cinema preferred either continental
films or latterly Hollywood to the homegrown product. Over the past thirty
years that position has changed dramatically. There are now monographs,
journals, book series, university courses and conferences entirely devoted
to British cinema.
The Tauris British Film Guide series seeks to add to that process of
revaluation by assessing in depth key British films from the past hundred
years. Each film guide will establish the historical and cinematic context of
the film, provide a detailed critical reading and assess the reception and
after-life of the production. The series will draw on all genres and all eras
and will over time build into a wide-ranging library of informed, in-depth
books on the films that have defined British cinema. It is a publishing project
that will comprehensively refute Truffaut’s ill-informed judgement and
demonstrate the variety, creativity, humanity, poetry and mythic power of
the best of British cinema.

JEFFREY RICHARDS
General Editor, the British Film Guides
British Film Guides published and forthcoming:
The Charge of the Light Brigade Mark Connelly
The Dam Busters John Ramsden
Dracula Peter Hutchings
My Beautiful Laundrette Christine Geraghty
A Night to Remember Jeffrey Richards
The Private Life of Henry VIII Greg Walker
The Red Shoes Mark Connelly
The 39 Steps Mark Glancy
Whisky Galore! and The Maggie Colin McArthur
A BRITISH FILM GUIDE

The 39 Steps
MARK GLANCY
Published in  by I.B.Tauris & Co Ltd
 Salem Road, London  
 Fifth Avenue, New York  
www.ibtauris.com
In the United States of America and Canada distributed by Palgrave
Macmillan a division of St Martin’s Press,  Fifth Avenue, New York
 
Copyright © Mark Glancy, 
The right of Mark Glancy to be identified as the author of this work has
been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents
Act, .
All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in a review, this book,
or any part thereof, may not be reproduced in any form without permis-
sion in writing from the publisher.
    
A full  record for this book is available from the British Library
A full  record for this book is available from the Library of Congress
Library of Congress catalog card: available
Set in Monotype Fournier and Univers Black by Ewan Smith, London
Printed and bound in Great Britain by MPG Books, Bodmin
 Contents

Illustrations /vi
Acknowledgements /viii

Film Credits 
Introduction 
 Production Context 
 The  Steps 
 Post-Production 
Epilogue 

Notes 
Sources 
 Illustrations

. John Buchan and Alfred Hitchcock meet at the Shepherd’s Bush

studios in London during the making of The  Steps. 
. Madeleine Carroll, Alma Reville and Alfred Hitchcock on the set at
the Shepherd’s Bush studios. 
. Robert Donat, Madeleine Carroll and Alfred Hitchcock talking on
the set. 
. Oscar Werndorff ’s bright, white set design for Richard Hannay’s
kitchen. 
. The warped and claustrophobic set design for the bedroom of the
crofter’s cottage. 
. The storyboard for a shot of Hannay being pursued across the moors. 
. The shot as realized on the set, although it was not used in the finished
film. 
. The storyboard for the shot of Hannay and Annabella arriving at
his flat. It would be realized in the film almost exactly as it is pictured
here. 
. The storyboard for a scene on the Forth Bridge. The scene was shot
on location (in Hertfordshire) rather than in the studio, and the result
was quite different from the way it is pictured here. 
. The storyboards for the planned first three shots of the film; only
the third shot would be used in the finished film. 
. From left to right, Penrose Tennyson, Madeleine Carroll, Robert
Donat, Alfred Hitchcock and an unidentified assistant (holding
the script) rehearse the scene in which Hannay and Pamela escape
from the spies. 
. Annabella Smith tries to warn Hannay about the man with the missing
finger. 
. Annabella’s death is Hannay’s awakening. 
. Hannay disguises himself as the milkman. 
. The cleaning woman discovers the body. 
. The commercial travellers and an example of their wares. 
I L L U S T R AT I O N S vii

. Hannay, the crofter’s wife and the crofter, caught in the headlights of
an approaching car. 
. Professor Jordan, Mrs Jordan, Hannay and the Jordans’ maid exchange
worried looks when Hannay first arrives at Alt-na-Shellach. 
. Professor Jordan reveals his hand to Hannay. 
. Hannay acts the part that Pamela has imagined for him: a cold-
blooded murderer on the moors in the middle of the night. 
. Pamela removes her stockings, but Hannay shows little interest. 
. Hannay and Pamela as ‘honeymooners’ manacled together by
handcuffs. 
. Mr Memory pauses as Hannay asks him, ‘What are the thirty-nine
steps?’ 
. Backstage at the Palladium, Mr Memory reveals all that he knows to
Hannay. 
. In a taxi leaving the Palladium, Hannay tells Pamela that they already
are married. The scene was cut from the film before it was released. 
. The film’s poster. Note that Hitchcock’s name is at the bottom and
in the smallest letters, and Buchan’s name does not appear at all. 
 Acknowledgements

I am very grateful to Jeffrey Richards for offering me the opportunity

to write about The  Steps. It has been a labour of love and an in-
teresting test of my affection and admiration for the film. Even on the
thirty-ninth viewing, it still seems fresh, lively, and full of revelations.
I am also grateful to Janet Moat, who guided me through the Balcon
Collection at the British Film Institute, to Val Almendarez at the Acad-
emy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences for his assistance with the
Alfred Hitchcock Collection, and to Devan Pailet for his hospitality
during my time in Los Angeles. Charles Barr, James Chapman, Stephen
Guy, Kirsten Sarna, Patrick McGilligan and John Ramsden were kind
enough to answer my questions, listen to my ideas about the film and
offer their own. Finally, special thanks are due to Mark Connelly, Sue
Harper and Roger Law, who read various drafts of the manuscript and
offered much support and valued advice along the way.
The stills are provided by The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and
Sciences, BFI Films: Stills, Posters and Designs and Jerry Ohlinger’s
Movie Material Store. They appear by courtesy of Carlton International
Media Limited and they are reproduced for the purposes of critical
analysis.
 Film Credits

THE 39 STEPS

Production Company Gaumont-British Pictures

Distributors Gaumont-British Distributors Ltd.
Director Alfred Hitchcock
Screenplay Charles Bennett (adaptation)
Alma Reville (continuity)
Ian Hay (dialogue)
(based on the book by John Buchan)
Photography Bernard Knowles
Art Director O. Werndorff
Editor D. N. Twist
Recordist A. Birch
Wardrobe Marianne
Dress Designer J. Strassner
Musical Director Louis Levy
(uncredited)
Producer Michael Balcon
Associate Producer Ivor Montagu
Length , feet
Running Time  minutes
UK Première  June 
US Première  August 

CAST

Robert Donat Richard Hannay

Madeleine Carroll Pamela
Lucie Mannheim Miss Smith
Godfrey Tearle Professor Jordan
Peggy Ashcroft Crofter’s Wife
Helen Haye Mrs Jordan
John Laurie Crofter
Frank Cellier The Sheriff
Wylie Watson Mr Memory
Peggy Simpson Maid
THE 39 STEPS 2

Jerry Verno Commercial Traveller

Gus McNaughton Commercial Traveller
(uncredited)
Frederick Piper Milkman
John Turnbull Police Inspector
Ivor Barnard Chairman of Political Meeting
Matthew Boulton Fake Police Officer
S. J. Warmington Detective
Vida Hope Usherette
Miles Malleson Palladium Manager
 Introduction

‘What are the thirty-nine steps?’, Richard Hannay cries out from the
stalls of the London Palladium. It is the climactic final reel of The 
Steps, and Hannay has just figured out that the seedy little man on stage,
a music-hall performer named Mr Memory, is a key figure in the con-
spiracy that has enveloped him.
Hannay’s journey to arrive at this moment of revelation has been
perilous and filled with every kind of trial and hardship. It begins when
he meets a mysterious woman outside a drab East End music hall. He
casually takes her back to his flat, and then wakes up in the night to find
her stabbed in the back and staggering through the room towards him.
She falls over him, dead, as he lies in bed and watches with horror.
Hannay is then presumed to be her murderer and he has to travel nearly
the length of Britain to prove his innocence and unravel the mystery
behind this murder. Throughout the journey, his physical powers seem
almost superhuman. When pursued by the police, he leaps from a moving
train and later through a police station window. He flees across the
Scottish moors, from pursuers on foot and in a helicopter. When he
encounters the real villain, Hannay survives being shot, seemingly
through the heart, and escapes yet again. He goes on another journey
across the moors, but this time handcuffed to a woman who hates
him. And throughout it all, he successfully impersonates a milkman, a
mechanic, a politician, a career criminal and a honeymooner from Ham-
mersmith. Little wonder, then, that in the ending, when his question is
not immediately answered, he demands once again: ‘Go on, tell us, what
are the thirty-nine steps?’ Mr Memory is shot in mid-sentence as he
begins his reply, but he does manage to say enough to clear Hannay and
explain the curious title of the film. Most people who have seen the film,
however, seem unable to remember exactly what that explanation is.
Even the film’s most ardent fans, who can recall whole scenes or just the
more general sense of suspense and thrills, are often unable to remember
the precise details of this moment of revelation.
THE 39 STEPS 4

One reason why this central point seems to slip from memory may
be because this classic film and the very popular book on which it is
based offer different explanations. In the film Mr Memory reveals that
the thirty-nine steps is the name of an organization of spies, but in John
Buchan’s original novel the title refers to actual steps, leading from a
clifftop to a beach, which serve as a rendezvous point for the spies. In
both the novel and the film, though, it is a detail that hardly matters.
What is crucial (and memorable) is the sense of menace lurking behind
a façade of normality, the idea that the world stands on the brink of
destruction and there is only one man who knows this and can save it,
and, most importantly, the sense of fast-paced adventure with which
this is conveyed. Any calamity, monstrous or mundane, might be thrown
at the Richard Hannay of both the novel and the film, and he would
extricate himself by either physical fortitude or mental acuity. And then,
with scarcely a scratch or a bead of sweat to show for his difficulties, he
would move on to the next challenge. In the midst of these adventures,
we learn remarkably little about the man. He apparently has no friends,
relatives or even family. He does not seem to belong to any particular
person, place, group or party. Even when he gives an impromptu political
speech, in both the novel and the film, it is impossible to gauge his true
political opinions. There is little about him, therefore, to obstruct a
reader or viewer’s identification with him, and there is much to en-
courage it. What we do see is a man of action and purpose, who is able
to play out the fantasies of both his creators and his audience.
There are some striking similarities between Hannay, the fictional
character, and Buchan, his creator. Both were natives of Scotland but
spent time in South Africa. Both had smart homes in London’s Portland
Place (Buchan at number , Hannay at number ), although neither
came from a particularly wealthy background. And, in the summer of
, as Europe went to war, both had a strong desire to do something
useful and exciting, despite being on the cusp of middle age. Hannay is
said to be thirty-seven years old, while Buchan was about to turn thirty-
nine. This is where the similarities between Buchan and Hannay end,
though, because on the eve of the First World War Buchan became ill
with a duodenal ulcer and was forced to take a restful holiday. On
doctor’s orders, Buchan could experience no excitement and take no
crucial role in the preparations for war. In August , he went to the
seaside town of Broadstairs, in Kent, to recuperate. There he had to
negotiate a steep flight of steps in order to get from a clifftop holiday
home to the beach below. It is not difficult to imagine that, feeling ill
INTRODUCTION 5

and prematurely frail as he turned thirty-nine that August, Buchan was

resentful and particularly aware of each and every one of the steps on
his path to and from the beach. He used his time as an invalid by going
to work on what he called a ‘shocker’, a story of twists, turns and
intrigue that became The Thirty-Nine Steps. Its hero, Richard Hannay,
was the physically fit adventurer who could do all of the things the
author could not.1
It is more difficult to find any similarities between the film director
Alfred Hitchcock and Richard Hannay. They seem entirely different in
temperament, physical ability and family background. Hitchcock’s father
was a greengrocer in Leytonstone, a working-class neighbourhood on
the eastern fringe of London, and the family lived above the shop. As
a boy, his hobby was memorizing train and tram timetables. He was
described ‘as a loner and watcher, an observer rather than a participant’.2
His obesity prevented him from serving in the First World War, and,
after his father’s death, he lived with his mother until he married at the
age of twenty-seven. The quiet and seemingly withdrawn Hitchcock
was, however, an avid reader of fiction and had a particular taste for
that type of Victorian fiction that borders on the fantastic. Robert Louis
Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde and Oscar
Wilde ’s The Picture of Dorian Gray were said to have been two of his
adolescent favourites, and later he became an admirer of Buchan’s
fiction.3 He read The Thirty-Nine Steps when he was twenty years old
and had just entered the film industry at a lowly level. He recalled that
the book impressed him so much that he vowed, ‘if I ever became a
director I would make a picture of it’.4 Fifteen years later, in the mid-
s, he was perhaps the best-known British film director and he was
under contract to a studio, Gaumont-British, which appreciated his
talents. He was given his choice of film projects and the opportunity of
working with some of Britain’s best writers, production artists and
technicians. Yet even in the midst of his fame and success Hitchcock
still projected a rather austere and dry personality. Shortly after the
American producer David O. Selznick met him for the first time in ,
he reported back to his wife that Hitchcock was ‘not exactly a man to
go camping with’.5 The director nevertheless made films with pace, wit,
suspense and shocks. His definition of drama was ‘life with the dull bits
cut out’ and few films demonstrate this outlook as throroughly and
successfully as The  Steps.6
The common ground between Buchan and Hitchcock was their under-
standing of the need for armchair adventures, and their ability to deliver
THE 39 STEPS 6

them effectively. Hannay was their surrogate adventurer, and he served

that purpose for fans of the book and film too. Hitchcock clearly under-
stood this. While The  Steps was playing in cinemas across Britain in
January , he wrote an article for the fan magazine Picturegoer, which
explained ‘why thrillers thrive’: ‘Our nature is that we must have these
shake-ups, or we grow sluggish and jellified; but, on the other hand, our
civilisation has so screened and sheltered us that it isn’t practical to
experience sufficient thrills at first hand. So we have to experience them
artificially, and the screen is the best mechanism for this.’7
The  Steps did thrive. It was released at a time when it was still
exciting for a British film to achieve box-office success, even within
Britain. It promoted its stars, Robert Donat and Madeleine Carroll, to
the top rank of popularity. It was not the first thriller to combine
suspense with humour, but it was one of the earliest examples of this
new type, and one of the most successful on both counts. While many
critics of the time were reluctant to hail a mere thriller as an important
and powerful film, it none the less enhanced Hitchcock’s reputation as
a great entertainer and an inventive filmmaker. It was the first of his
films to be widely distributed in the United States, and it was the film
that brought Hitchcock to the attention of Hollywood.
More recently, The  Steps has been seen by many as the archetypal
Hitchcock film. It is said to have initiated, or at least to have expanded
or refined, many of the elements of Hitchcock’s films that are so recog-
nizable today. In the broadest terms, its basic plot components were
clearly borrowed for many of the director’s later films, including (most
obviously) Young and Innocent (), The Lady Vanishes (), Foreign
Correspondent (), Saboteur () and North by Northwest (). But
more detailed aspects of The  Steps can be used to link it to virtually
any earlier or later Hitchcock film. While these are obviously points of
some interest, this approach seems a rather narrow means of analysing
and appreciating the film’s particular charms. This does not mean that I
intend to discount Hitchcock’s central role in the making of the film, but
it does mean that my analysis will also consider the the novel upon which
the film is based, as well as the producers, screenwriters, production
artists, stars and cast members who collaborated with Hitchcock. There
are also many diverse influences apparent in The  Steps, including the
films of directors such as Luis Buñuel, Frank Capra and Fritz Lang.
Hitchcock seems to have been particularly willing to learn and borrow
from his fellow directors, and that is one factor behind this film’s richness.
The  Steps can be seen as a film of its time. As a British film of the
INTRODUCTION 7

s, it is particularly notable for its sharp and at times humorous social
observation. Indeed, its minor characters and off-beat settings are among
its most memorable features. And, while audiences may not remember
precisely what the thirty-nine steps are in the film, few could fail to recall
the odd, nightmarish sense of both mayhem and complacency that
pervades the film. It offers an early and chilling warning of the threat
that Britain faced from abroad in . Perhaps more remarkably, though,
the story also portrays Britain as a country threatened as much by its
own disunity and lethargy as it is by any foreign power. There is a sense
of impending upheaval that is not at all tempered by the film’s ending.
The  Steps is also a surprisingly sexy film. Its bedroom scenes, double
entendres and moments of fetishistic revelation – ranging from the
handcuffed couple in bed together to the film’s almost obsessive interest
in women’s clothing – seem somehow to have escaped the scorn of the
censors who are said to have ruled British cinema so strictly in this era.
In short, The  Steps has strengths, charms and surprises of its own.
These are greater than the sum of all of these parts and seem to increase
with each viewing, and that explains why it continues to be revived,
enjoyed, remembered and discussed so many decades after its initial
release.
 ONE
Production Context

J O H N B U C H A N ’ S T H E T H I R T Y- N I N E S T E P S

By December , Buchan had finished the story that he had begun
during his convalescence, although he had not yet settled on a title. It was
at first called The Black Stone and later The Kennels of War before he hit
upon the catchier, more sinister and mysterious title The Thirty-Nine
Steps. The story was serialized by Blackwood’s magazine over the summer
of  and then published as a novel in October . From the first it
was a popular favourite, with sales reaching , by the end of the
year.1 It is easy to see that it would appeal particularly to adolescent boys,
not least because of its daring hero and the lack of romance or even a
significant female character. It is surprising, then, that Alfred Hitchcock
apparently did not read the book until he was twenty years old (in 
or ), when he was past his adolescence and the book’s topicality,
centred on the outbreak of war, had waned. He thought it was a ‘rattling
good book’, though, and fifteen years later, in , his enthusiasm for
the story remained intact. Yet he also claimed that, as a seasoned director,
he found the book was ‘not in the least suitable for screening’ and insisted
that he had had to ignore the book while developing the screenplay: ‘I
found that by taking certain of the characters, part of the plot, and the
excellent locales, I had the background for a very good screen story.
Therefore I ignored the book as it stood, and developed the story with
the screen in mind.’2
While Hitchcock was always ready to cite Buchan as an influence
upon his work, he discussed his influence only in vague terms. He told
François Truffaut, for example, that he admired Buchan’s ‘understate-
ment of highly dramatic ideas’, and then went on to point out the aspects
of the screenplay that were original and not derived from the novel.3
The screenwriter Charles Bennett had even less admiration for the
original source of the film. ‘I thought the novel was terrible,’ he told
Donald Spoto, and to Spoto and other interviewers he stressed the
PRODUCTION CONTEXT 9

. John Buchan and Alfred Hitchcock meet at the Shepherd’s Bush studios
in London during the making of The  Steps. (Source: BFI Films:
Stills, Posters and Designs)

originality and the superiority of the script.4 This is a view that has been
endorsed repeatedly by biographers and critics over the years, and one
that reached a kind of zenith with Raymond Durgnat’s statement: ‘The
screen version of The Thirty-Nine Steps relates to its original even less
closely than Joe Macbeth to Macbeth.’5
What can explain this willingness to diminish or deny the qualities
that the film inherited from the novel? It may stem partly from the
initial reviews that the film received in , many of which informed
readers that The  Steps was not a faithful adaptation of the well-
known novel, at least in so far as female characters and a romantic
ending had been introduced. Perhaps more significantly, the early auteur
critics preferred to consider Hitchcock in isolation, and rarely discussed
those who influenced or collaborated with him, and this seems to have
fed into Hitchcock’s own reluctance to share the limelight with others.
Hitchcock would mention his admiration for some English authors
(J. B. Priestley, John Galsworthy and Mrs Belloc Lowndes among them)
but only in the vague way that he mentioned Buchan.6 He was even
THE 39 STEPS 10

more circumspect when discussing the screenwriters he collaborated

with, and seemed reluctant to give them credit for their creative input.
This clearly infuriated Charles Bennett, and after Hitchcock’s death
Bennett began telling interviewers that he alone deserved most of the
credit for the screenplay of The  Steps and other films.7 As we shall
see, his claim entailed the denigration of everyone else’s creative input.
Buchan, of course, is easily lost in this shuffle. I would suggest, however,
that there is at least one more significant factor behind the reluctance of
film critics to discuss Buchan and The Thirty-Nine Steps. That is, Buchan
is a deeply unfashionable author. In fact, the values and beliefs that
come across so strongly in Buchan’s fiction have been unfashionable
since the s, and that was the decade in which film studies began to
flower as an academic discipline, and the decade in which Hitchcock
became the focus of so much critical attention.
Buchan had an extraordinary life and an amazingly varied career.
The Thirty-Nine Steps was the first in his series of Richard Hannay’s
adventures, which continued in the novels Greenmantle (), Mr Stand-
fast (), The Three Hostages () and The Island of Sheep ().
Buchan also published other novels, collections of short stories and
poems, essays on his native Scotland and on Africa, military histories,
biographies of historical and literary figures such as Oliver Cromwell,
Sir Walter Raleigh and Sir Walter Scott, and even a book on tax laws.
Furthermore, writing was only one part of a career that also included
a range of prominent posts and appointments. He was a colonial ad-
ministrator in South Africa after the Boer War. During the First World
War he worked at the Foreign Office and War Office before taking an
appointment as Director of Intelligence at the newly formed Ministry
of Information. He was elected as a Member of Parliament in . In
 he became the Lord High Commissioner of the Church of Scotland
and, just before the release of The  Steps in , he was appointed
Governor-General of Canada. If there is a single common thread run-
ning through his career, it is his patriotism, his sense of duty, and his
strong belief in Britain’s imperial mission. Buchan’s values were those
of a Victorian gentleman, and this is as clear in his fiction as it is in his
broader career. At its best, his fiction acknowledges the fragility of the
sense of order and decency that it seeks to celebrate and defend; it
demonstrates ‘the thinness of civilisation’ and the idea that the distinction
between order and chaos is ‘a line, a thread, a sheet of glass’.8 At its
worst, it can seem jingoistic, xenophobic and anti-Semitic.
Those who know the film but have not read the book would probably
PRODUCTION CONTEXT 11

be surprised by Buchan’s Richard Hannay. The character is said to have

been based upon Lord Ironside of Archangel, an intelligence officer in
the Boer War who was adept at disguise and noted for his exploits
behind enemy lines. However, this precise reference point can easily be
overstated. Buchan presents a minimal amount of background informa-
tion on Hannay; enough to establish the character’s motives, purpose
and outlook. We learn very early that Hannay was born in Scotland but
raised in South Africa, that he worked as a mining engineer in Rhodesia,
made a modest fortune9 and then returned to Britain at the age of thirty-
seven to live the quiet and leisurely life of a London gentleman. Thus,
his background positions him as both British and as a part of the loyal
British Empire, and it makes him emblematic of the close links between
the two. He also seems to uphold a Victorian ideal of well-bred mascu-
linity. He has a gentleman’s manner and intelligence, and his time in
London is spent doing the rounds of elite clubs, dinner parties and fine
restaurants. Even if this metropolitan environment induces a sort of
lethargic malaise in Hannay, it is made clear that he is known and
accepted in the higher social circles. In keeping with the masculine ideal,
though, Hannay is not all effete or (heaven forbid) an intellectual, and
references to his work ‘in the bush’ make it plain that he has not led a
cosseted life. At one point, he even refers to his ability to perform ‘the
old Mashona trick’ of throwing a knife in the air and catching it in his
mouth.10 It is very difficult to imagine the film’s Hannay, as played by
Robert Donat, demonstrating such skills, but Buchan’s Hannay is quite
different. He stands in a long line of the British Empire’s literary heroes
who are equally at home in a drawing room and in the wilds. They do
not merely enjoy the fruits of civilization but actively defend civilization.
And, if this sense of active service to a higher cause is taken away, they
find themselves, in Kipling’s phrase, ‘at the edge of nothing’.11 This is
where Richard Hannay stands at the outset of The Thirty-Nine Steps,
after a mere three months of a life of leisure in London. The story
works to pull him back from this void, taking him out of a sheltered and
pampered urban existance and putting him on the run in the natural
world.
Hannay is cured of his metropolitan malaise when he finds his neigh-
bour, the American Franklin P. Scudder, seeking refuge from a group
of spies intent on murdering him. Scudder tells a wild tale. He says that
while travelling across Europe under assumed identities and an array of
disguises he has uncovered a plot to assassinate the Greek prime minister
and so bring Europe to the brink of war. In blatantly offensive terms,
THE 39 STEPS 12

Scudder informs Hannay that the plot is all part of an elaborate Jewish
conspiracy. However, it should be noted that these anti-Semitic views
belong to this character alone and that they are proven to be false.
Scudder’s conspiracy theory and his anti-Semitism appear, on reflection,
to be the ravings of a madman.12 Before we can be sure of that, Scudder
is murdered and Hannay’s quest is set in motion. It is made clear that
his primary motive on this quest is patriotic; that is, to finish Scudder’s
work by finding and defeating the spies who threaten Britain and the
empire. A secondary motive is to avenge Scudder’s murder and an even
smaller priority is Hannay’s need to clear his own name. He is an almost
entirely altruistic character, and one with an unambiguous belief in the
state, its authority and its benevolence. Of course, he is pursued by the
police as well as by the agents of the Black Stone, but in Buchan’s story
the police do not figure as strongly or as threateningly as the spies.
If Hannay has a darker side, it is his similarity to the spies and his
ability to challenge and ultimately to beat them at their own game. Like
Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes, he fights his enemies at least partly on
their own terms, using deceit, disguise and an almost supernatural cap-
acity for transformation. To escape his own block of flats on the morning
after the murder, Hannay poses as a Cockney milkman. On the train to
Scotland, he is a poor Scottish hill farmer sitting in a third-class carriage.
To a sympathetic and helpful innkeeper, he is a South African mining
magnate. He addresses a political rally as an Australian advocate of free
trade, and then in rapid succession poses as a Scottish roadman, sailor
and cattle drover. His skill at assuming identities links him closely with
the spies. The Black Stone is headed by a sinister ‘old man with a young
voice who can hood his eyes like a hawk’13 and the other members seem
equally adept at physical transformation. They are capable of taking on
many different disguises and, despite being German, they can pass as
Englishmen even within Britain. They operate without boundaries,
appearing in British cities, suburbs and the most remote areas of the
countryside. They also are able to pass as anonymous businessmen,
leisurely gentlemen and, more remarkably, to pose convincingly as well-
known government figures. Once Scudder has been killed, Hannay alone
is alert to their threat, and it takes his own powers of intelligence,
fortitude and disguise, first to escape from agents of the Black Stone
and then to figure out and stop their plan. Hannay is remarkably adept
at this: he is able to decode their ciphers, predict their movements and
extricate himself from every tight corner they place him in. He is also
the one man able to see through their elaborate disguises. At the climax
PRODUCTION CONTEXT 13

of the story, this ability is referred to as ‘recognition’ and described in

a manner that suggests a familiarity and connection between Hannay
and the Black Stone. The Black Stone thus appears to be Mr Hyde to
Hannay’s Dr Jekyll, and in fact the most significant difference between
them is motive. Hannay works unselfishly to restore order and what he
believes to be right, whereas his opponents work for selfish gain and
without caring if their actions bring chaos and destruction.
The Black Stone has greater ambitions than simply assassinating the
Greek prime minister. Its goal is to capture the plans for the disposition
of the British naval fleet in the event of war. Then, after the assassination
has sparked off a war, Germany will be able to sink the Royal Navy
immediately, striking a devastating first blow at the very heart of Britain’s
military power. The story thus suggests that if Britain were to suffer
some calamitous defeat, it would be the result of an unsportsmanlike
manoeuvre rather than weakness or inferiority. It also portrays the
coming of war as a series of events involving high-level, clean and swift
machinations. There is no sense that a world which operates by such
means could become bogged down in gruesome, bloody and prolonged
trench warfare and no sense that this international conflict could involve
millions of casualties. Such a story was bound to have a timely appeal
when it was first published in , arriving as it did in the midst of spy
scares and strong anti-German feeling. However, its appeal was not
simply a matter of the Germans being dastardly. Buchan’s story is
presented as a behind-the-scenes account of how and why Europe went
to war. He portrays a world in which good and evil can exist side by side,
and evil can appear suddenly, unexpectedly and in the most ordinary
places. Appearances are almost always deceptive, and even those who
seem trustworthy can be revealed as corrupt and malign. Order can turn
into chaos in an instant. It is a world-view very much tailored to .
As Buchan states in the dedication to the novel, this was a time ‘when
the wildest fictions are so much less improbable than the facts’.14 By
portraying a world in which chivalry still exists, and suggesting that the
good have luck on their side, his story creates some sense of order out
of the wild and the improbable.
That the novel has endured beyond its immediate topicality, and has
in fact remained in print throughout the twentieth century, is due to the
skill and enthusiasm with which it was written. The story is told at such
a breathlessly fast pace that there is little opportunity to question prob-
abilities. Hannay’s malaise, his journey and all of the scrapes, discoveries
and encounters take place within little more than one hundred pages. The
THE 39 STEPS 14

transitions from one encounter to the next are swift and ingenious, and
the suspense never slackens. The first-person narration is another strong
factor in making the story immediate and compulsive. From the very first
sentence (‘I returned from the City about three o’clock on that May
afternoon pretty well disgusted with life’),15 Hannay’s voice is intimate,
casual and believable. Events are never exaggerated, the story never slows
or strays, and the more ominous developments and implications are not
presented portentously, even when Hannay’s life seems to be in immedi-
ate danger. Instead, there is pervasive sense of rollicking adventure.
Hannay himself admits to enjoying the ‘schoolboy game of hare and
hounds’ in which he at times finds himself in the position of the hare.16
Any of the novel’s most identifiable qualities – suspense, thrills, speed,
the chase – can easily be identified as ‘Hitchcockian’. Perhaps the most
immediately striking influence is the story-line known as the ‘double
pursuit’, centred on an innocent protagonist who is wrongly accused of
a crime and must go on the run from both the police and the real
criminals. Hitchcock was to use this story-line many times, and said that
the ‘double pursuit’ served two purposes. First, the tale of an innocent
man who has been wrongly accused builds ‘tremendous sympathy’ for
the man on the run. Second, it means that the man cannot simply phone
the police to solve his problems, thereby ending the story.17 Another
‘Hitchcockian’ factor that is evident in Buchan’s novel is that the drama
of the chase is enhanced by a lack of detail about both the pursuers and
the pursued. In the first two-thirds of the novel, for example, neither
Hannay nor the reader has much knowledge of what the Black Stone or
the thirty-nine steps might be, while in the film there is even less detailed
information and the spies’ nationality is never stated. Angus MacPhail,
who was a friend of Hitchcock’s and also the story editor at Gaumont-
British, referred to this vague quality as ‘the MacGuffin’ of Hitchcock’s
films.18 This is the notion that if the chase has enough twists, turns,
shocks and surprises, the exact details of what is being sought and by
whom become an unimportant distraction. Many film critics have taken
this to mean that Hitchcock’s spy thrillers have no interest in their wider
political context; that the lack of importance attached to such details
signifies that the political context is unimportant too. Yet Buchan was
obviously using his chase story to address the international situation as
it stood in , and the film says as much as it was possible to say in
 about its political context, while drawing attention to the constraints
of censorship that prevented it from saying more.
There is much shared ground between Buchan and Hitchcock in
PRODUCTION CONTEXT 15

regard to subjectivity and identification, too. Buchan’s skill at using

first-person narration to enhance the reader’s identification with Hannay
was singled out for praise by the Times Literary Supplement when the
book was reviewed in : ‘the reader feel[s] that he himself was the
hero. It was we who showed all this courage and resource; it was we
who read Scudder’s cipher; we who whistled “Annie Laurie” to the
great Foreign Office personage.’19 Hitchcock, of course, had different
methods and tools (particularly subjective camerawork) to work with,
but his goal was the same: to make the audience see and hear what the
character sees and hears, and therefore to make the audience feel what
the character feels. The author and director also share an interest in
testing the limits of a reader or viewer’s identification, and in both the
novel and the film Hannay’s darker qualities are revealed while the lead
villain is seen, initially at least, to have some charm and grace. The idea
of moral and psychological dualities, or doubling, is seen most strongly
in the book when Hannay has a strong impulse to give in and join the
spies with whom he shares so many skills and abilities. The Hannay of
the film does not consider crossing over, but his character is revealed to
have flaws that mirror those of the villain, and, as we shall see, identi-
fication with him is in some instances tested or made problematic.
There are also smaller and more incidental aspects of the film that
Hitchcock and the screenwriters clearly took from the book. The film’s
opening in the music hall was drawn from a passage at the beginning of
the novel in which Hannay reveals that in his boredom he visited a music
hall and found it unpleasant (‘It was a silly show, all capering women and
monkey-faced men and I did not stay long’).20 In both the novel and the
film, Hannay discovers that the spy has been violently murdered in his
parlour, making a space that was previously established as private and
safe into one that is violated and filled with danger. In both versions he
escapes from his flat dressed as a milkman. One of the highlights of the
film, Hannay’s impromptu speech to a political meeting, has its origins
in the novel. So too does the scene in which Hannay, while being chased
by the police through remote countryside, stumbles into the villain’s
headquarters. In the novel, Hannay is given food and shelter by a lonely
wife in a shepherd’s cottage, which would seem to prefigure the film’s
scene in the crofter’s cottage. Whistling is used as a code or clue in both
the novel and the film. And, in one of the novel’s most striking scenes,
Hannay runs for his life through the wilds of Scotland and reaches a
high and remote spot. Assuming that his pursuers would come in a car
or on foot, he feels safe and secure in the knowledge that from his high
THE 39 STEPS 16

vantage point he can see any pursuer hours in advance. Just then,
however, a plane appears on the horizon, heading towards him with both
speed and purpose.21 This scene would be partially realized in The 
Steps, when a gyroplane briefly hovers above Hannay while he is being
pursued across the moors, but it is surely the seed from which sprang
the more elaborate crop-dusting sequence in Hitchcock’s North by North-
west. The ease and swiftness with which safety, order and normality can
slip away clearly fascinated both Buchan and Hitchcock.
These parallels and similarities are not demonstrated here as a means
of suggesting that Buchan was the ultimate source of all that is now
referred to as ‘Hitchcockian’, or that little was changed when The Thirty-
Nine Steps was adapted for the screen – some of the most significant
aspects of the film have no basis in the novel – but they do indicate the
extent to which the filmmakers were not only influenced by the book,
but also took aspects from it that were both large and small. Far from
being ignored, the novel seems to have been carefully studied and
genuinely appreciated by the filmmakers.
The most frequently cited difference between the novel and the film
is the film’s introduction of female characters and a romance. There are
obvious reasons for this change. A romance, of course, was and still
remains an almost unavoidable cinematic convention. But this new
dimension to the story is not simply a thin and meaningless romantic
sub-plot, grafted on to Buchan’s all-male adventure story. Instead, the
screenwriters built upon a significant aspect of the novel, using a Freudian
understanding of the character’s psychological state and particularly his
sexuality. At the start of the novel, Hannay is seen to be succumbing to
the crisis of masculinity in a modern, industrialized and urban world; a
crisis that is particularly worthy of attention on the eve of war. By
leaving the city, and hunting and being hunted in the wild, he reclaims
his masculinity and in doing so saves the nation. The film’s romance
adds a parallel layer to this journey away from malaise and purpose-
lessness, and it is one which takes Hannay from a state of impotence and
repressed desire towards a state of potency and sexual awakening. Ivor
Montagu, the film’s associate producer, recalled many years later that he
and his colleagues were captivated by Freudian ideas and in his own
opinion they applied them naively.22 Yet this new dimension to the story
is perfectly integrated, and it is often handled with a wry humour that
prevents it from becoming crude or sentimental.
Another significant change involves what might be termed the values
and outlook of the story. Buchan’s novel is characterized by pre-war
PRODUCTION CONTEXT 17

idealism, but the film is very much the product of post-war disillusion-
ment. The romantic notion of the altruistic hero who is willing and able
to save the world (or at least his country) from ruinous defeat has almost
completely disappeared in the film. The Hannay of the film is less of a
Boy’s Own hero, less upper class, and not quite so rough and ready. In
fact, in so far as he has a clear identity at all, he is a modern, classless
Everyman, who is far more cynical and world-weary than Buchan’s
adventurer. He is certainly less altruistic, and it is made clear that he
embarks on his journey primarily to save his own skin. Equally, he does
not inhabit a world of certainties and clear-cut values, as in the novel,
but a more modern world that is characterized by anonymity, volatile
crowds, and a pervading awareness of casual violence and brutality. His
travels are far more treacherous. The novel saw Hannay aided and
abetted by nearly everyone he met on his path; kindness and generosity
could be taken as the defining characteristics of the nation. Yet the film’s
Hannay is more hindered than helped by those he meets, most of whom
seem selfish and menacing. Worst of all are the police. There is little
sense in the novel – and one would guess that it simply was not a part
of Buchan’s world-view – that the police and the state they represent
are capable of gross injustice or brutality. In the film, however, the
police are seen as callous, ignorant and all too ready to throw the
innocent behind bars, and it seems at times that they pose a greater
threat to Hannay than the spies. Thus, an important aspect of this
adaptation was the updating of the story. Although it was written in
, Buchan’s novel was essentially a product of the nineteenth century.
The film that was made of it only twenty years later, however, seems to
belong entirely to the twentieth century and specifically to its most
volatile decade, the s.

U P D AT I N G T H E S T O R Y

One key means of updating the story was to change the object of the
spies’ pursuit. In the novel, the Black Stone seeks the plans for the
disposition of the British fleet in the event of war, which was a matter
of great strategic importance in . In the interwar years, however,
the significance of naval power steadily waned, particularly in the minds
of the general public. The next war, it was predicted, would be fought
in the air, and the country with the greatest air force would be capable
of a quick and decisive victory. It was assumed that the war would
begin with a surprise attack from the air, and that this would result in
THE 39 STEPS 18

the mass slaughter of civilians. Thus, in the film the spies seek the plans
for a silent airplane engine rather than naval plans. This was not only
timely and topical in , but also a pointed reference to Germany.
When the screenplay was written in the autumn of , Hitler had
been Chancellor of Germany for nearly two years, and the Nazis already
had achieved a significant degree of infamy. The Reichstag fire, the
mass burning of books, the murderous ‘night of the long knives’, the
government-sanctioned anti-Semitism and the Nuremberg rally of Sep-
tember  had been widely reported and commented on around the
world. Having abandoned the League of Nations and the Disarmament
Conference in October , Germany was already seen as a threat to
European peace. In Britain, the promise of disarmament had given way
to a policy of deterrence, and in July  the House of Commons
approved a vast increase in the size and strength of the Royal Air Force.
Even so, Winston Churchill warned from the backbenches that Germany
was developing its own air force at a faster rate. At a time when radar
did not yet exist, this seemed a catastrophic scenario. Indeed, the concept
of the silent airplane engine lends further credence to an already often
heard yet very disturbing phrase of the times, ‘the bomber will always
get through’.23
The film’s contemporary concerns are not limited to threats from
abroad, however. In , Buchan portrayed Britain as going into the
First World War with the patriotic self-confidence of a country that had
been the world’s greatest economic and military power for many decades.
His preoccupation with the ‘thinness of civilization’ is not a critique of
British society or culture, but rather an acknowledgement that under
extraordinary circumstances it could be undermined or destroyed.
Twenty years later the film took a very different view. At nearly every
stop on Hannay’s cross-country journey we find complacency and venal-
ity. It is a vision of a country without confidence, unity or purpose. Of
course, we now know that by comparison with its European neighbours,
Britain was a model of stability and consensus in the interwar years, and
that reports of its demise or disintegration were exaggerated and overly
pessimistic, but that is a judgement made with hindsight. At the time,
events seemed alarming and ‘unthinkable’ to an older generation raised
in more stable and prosperous times. The General Strike of  had
had a divisive and polarizing effect. The economic ‘slump’ at the begin-
ning of the s resulted in hunger marches and a run on sterling that
ended only when it was taken off the gold standard in . There was
a naval ‘mutiny’ (however mild) at Invergordon in that same year. The
PRODUCTION CONTEXT 19

Oxford Union declared that ‘this House will not fight for King and
Country’ in . And, perhaps most alarmingly, the British Union of
Fascists (BUF) was founded in  and proceeded to attract some ,
members over the next two years. This was a political party modelled
on Italy’s Blackshirts. Priding itself on thuggery and confrontation, its
notoriety climaxed in  with huge rallies in venues as large as the
Albert Hall and Kensington Olympia.
None of these events proved to be particularly meaningful over the
course of time (even the BUF faded away) and Britain did not go further
down this path of disintegration and unrest. The film, however, portrays
the country as standing on the verge of a descent into the abyss. It
captures a sense of ‘it could happen here ’ that was not altogether fan-
tastic in the mid-s. One aspect of this is that the characters are
eager to turn a blind eye to any danger or threat; complacency would
seem to be the most common national trait. Another is that in every
public gathering the public itself is seen to be restless and hostile. Crowds
are always on the verge of becoming a mob, and the one time we see
their hostility quelled (by Hannay) it is through pure demagoguery.
Perhaps the most striking aspect, however, can be found in the mise-en-
scène, revealing a menacing, shadowy and skewed vision that makes the
audience feel as though they are being led through a waking nightmare.
And so, although words such as ‘Germany’ and ‘Hitler’ are never spoken,
the atmosphere of the film actually conveys much more than any specific
references as to who, what and why.

A G A U M O N T- B R I T I S H F I L M

The story was updated and the film was made by one of Britain’s largest
and most creative film studios. In the mid-s Gaumont-British was
the closest any British film company came to rivalling a Hollywood
studio.24 Production was led by the bold and ambitious executive producer
Michael Balcon, who oversaw the making of as many as twenty-six films
a year at two London studios, one in Shepherd’s Bush and the other in
Islington. As in Hollywood, the studio itself was an international com-
munity of filmmakers, many of them from Central and Eastern Europe,
including not only stars and directors but also influential production
artists and designers. The films themselves were neither cheap ‘quota-
quickies’ nor the extravagant ‘super-specials’. For the most part, they
were moderately budgeted films centred on some of Britain’s most
popular stars and genres. The musicals of Jessie Matthews, the comedies
THE 39 STEPS 20

of Jack Hulbert, and adaptations of Ben Travers’s Aldwych farces

represented home-grown entertainment that was consistently popular
with British audiences.25 There were, however, grander plans in the
making. In the mid-s, the company’s ambitions became set on
cracking the very lucrative American market. This would involve making
films with production values that matched those of Hollywood films,
casting stars who had a following beyond Britain, and choosing stories
based upon their appeal to both British and American audiences.26 The
making of The  Steps was very much influenced by all of these factors.
The film was conceived, in the studio’s thinking at least, as one of the
‘star-spangled specials’ that would be given a wide release in the United
States, and this had a significant effect on the film’s production values.27
Balcon himself was keenly aware of the film’s potential, but stood back
from the production and gave Hitchcock considerable artistic freedom.
Perhaps more importantly, though, he created a production unit for
Hitchcock that included many of the director’s most sympathetic col-
laborators.
Hitchcock did not join Gaumont-British until , but his association
with Michael Balcon dated back to the early s. Balcon was then an
independent producer at Gainsborough Studios, and he gave Hitchcock
his first important filmmaking assignments. On the very first feature film
that Balcon produced, Woman to Woman (), the twenty-three-year-
old Hitchcock was the screenwriter, art director and assistant director.
He continued to work at Gainsborough in these various capacities for
a few years, until Balcon gave him two further opportunities in the mid-
s. First, he was able to work at UFA Studios in Germany because
of a co-production deal between Gainsborough and the German pro-
ducer Erich Pommer. German cinema was at this point enjoying its
golden age. It was known for its boldly stylized lighting, set design,
visual composition and effects, and so Hitchcock was able to work with,
or at least observe, some of the world’s best production artists and
technicians. He also observed the director F. W. Murnau at work and
was influenced by his fluid camerawork and his pursuit of ‘pure cinema’,
or expressively visual storytelling with as few words as possible. For an
aspiring filmmaker whose previous experience was limited to a com-
paratively small north London studio, this was a significant and, as it
turned out, an influential experience. Second, Hitchcock was given his
first films to direct, The Pleasure Garden () and The Mountain Eagle
(), both of which were Gainsborough productions filmed in Ger-
many. The greatest early success that Balcon and Hitchcock shared,
PRODUCTION CONTEXT 21

however, was Hitchcock’s third film as a director, The Lodger (),

which established his reputation overnight.
The Lodger was filmed in England, but its expressive mise-en-scène
demonstrated the German influence. With a story centred on a series of
murders and a man wrongly accused of committing them, the film now
seems to be (in the director’s own words) ‘the first true Hitchcock
movie ’.28 Coming at a time when British critics generally preferred
European films and British audiences preferred American films, The
Lodger was able to please both. Yet it does not seem to have occurred to
anyone, including Hitchcock himself, that he should continue to direct
thrillers, and at this point in his career Hitchcock’s work was as diverse
as it was innovative. His late silent and early sound films included the
boxing drama The Ring (), based on an original screenplay by
Hitchcock and his wife Alma Reville, as well as adaptations of Noël
Coward’s Easy Virtue (), John Galsworthy’s The Skin Game ()
and Sean O’Casey’s Juno and the Paycock (). Critics discussed ‘the
Hitchcock touch’, which referred to innovative camerawork and story-
telling techniques, and routinely referred to him as Britain’s greatest
director and even, on one occasion, as ‘our Lubitsch’.29 Under a new
contract at British International Pictures, he was said to be Britain’s
highest paid director, and one sign of his status at this point is that he
directed the country’s first ‘talking picture’, Blackmail (). This was
another thriller and probably his greatest commercial success after The
Lodger, but Hitchcock still was not associated exclusively or even prim-
arily with this genre. Indeed, when his fortunes began to fade in the early
s, and he left BIP, his first directing assignment (for an independent
producer) was the musical Waltzes from Vienna (). Today, this seems
fresh, well constructed and imaginatively filmed, but at the time it was
apparently unappreciated and did nothing to reverse the downward trend
of the director’s career. Hitchcock later described this period as one in
which his reputation had declined, and he supposed that others must
have thought of him, ‘You’re finished; your career is at its lowest ebb.’30
The turning point came the following year. Michael Balcon, now at
the helm of the expanding Gaumont-British, invited Hitchcock to join
him. Hitchcock accepted and expressed his wish to work on a story that
he had begun but never finished at BIP. In , BIP had teamed Hitch-
cock with Charles Bennett, the author of the original stage version
of Blackmail, and set them to work on a story that would involve
H. C. McNeile’s popular detective Bulldog Drummond. Bennett and
Hitchcock got so far as writing a scenario entitled ‘Bulldog Drummond’s
THE 39 STEPS 22

Baby’, in which the detective’s own child is kidnapped, but BIP did not
want to make the film and Hitchcock soon left the studio. Two years
later, Hitchcock asked Michael Balcon to buy the rights to ‘Bulldog
Drummond’s Baby’ from BIP and to hire Bennett to develop the story
with him. Balcon complied and paid £ for the story, and then watched
as Bennett and Hitchcock dropped the Bulldog Drummond character
from the story altogether.31 In fact, they turned to John Buchan’s The
Three Hostages (the fourth of the Richard Hannay stories) for inspiration.
The film that resulted, The Man Who Knew Too Much (), cannot be
termed an adaptation of The Three Hostages, but Buchan’s work clearly
played an important part in shaping the thriller formula that Hitchcock
and Bennett developed and used for the next few years. Indeed, when
The Man Who Knew Too Much was completed in October , they
thought of adapting Buchan’s Greenmantle (the second of the Richard
Hannay stories) next. Greenmantle involved adventures that were spead
across all of Europe and into the Middle East, though, and so it was
probably considered too expensive to mount. Hitchcock later said that
The Thirty-Nine Steps was chosen instead because it was ‘a smaller
subject’.32 It certainly proved to be a subject that could be quickly made.
Work on the script began in November , filming began two months
later and the film was released in June . The  Steps was then
followed in fairly rapid succession by The Secret Agent (), Sabotage
(), Young and Innocent () and The Lady Vanishes ().
It was with these six films that Hitchcock gained an international
audience and became so closely associated with the thriller genre. Hitch-
cock’s return to the thriller genre in the mid-s is thus seen by many
critics as a crucial turning point, the point at which the director finally
found his métier.33 The strength and ingenuity of these films, however,
cannot be attributed solely to the director’s affinity with the thriller
genre. A number of factors contributed to the creation of this remarkable
series of films. One is simply that Hitchcock’s arrival at Gaumont-British
came just as the more ambitious production programme was being
implemented, and so, beginning with The  Steps, more resources and
attention were directed towards Hitchcock’s films. A comparison of The
 Steps with the films made at BIP, or even with The Man Who Knew
Too Much, reveals the higher production values of the later film. Another
important factor is the role played by Michael Balcon. Directors seldom
have kind words to say about the production executives who control
their films, but Hitchcock has said that Balcon gave him considerable
creative freedom, and allowed him to experiment and to follow his
PRODUCTION CONTEXT 23

‘celluloid whims’.34 Balcon’s willingness to purchase ‘Bulldog Drum-

mond’s Baby’ and to hire Bennett certainly lends credence to the view
that he was a sympathetic producer, and one who supported rather than
interfered with his filmmakers. Furthermore, Hitchcock was not follow-
ing his celluloid whims in isolation but benefited from working with
veterans of his previous films as well as newcomers who included some
of the studio’s best production artists.
The Hitchcock production unit was remarkably stable over this
period. Louis Levy, the musical director of all six of the thrillers made
between  and , was at the top of his field in the s. The
director of photography, Bernard Knowles, and the editor, Derek Twist,
were also top-ranked in their respective fields at Gaumont-British, and
both eventually became directors themselves. The costume designer Joe
Strassner was a German émigré who worked with Hitchcock on several
films and made particularly notable contributions to The  Steps. The
art director Oscar Werndorff was another German émigré who shared
with Hitchcock a particular affinity for expressive mise-en-scène. As we
shall see, the storyboards that were prepared before filming began suggest
that the film’s visual dimension was carefully designed by the director
in tandem with these key members of the production unit.
Werndorff and Strassner were leading members of a large community
of German émigrés at Gaumont-British. The British film industry as a
whole had attracted European filmmakers, production artists, technicians
and actors since the late s, when film production in Britain rapidly
increased as a consequence of ‘quota’ regulations. As Michael Balcon
later explained, many up and coming British filmmakers received their
‘early instruction under the supervision of the men we had brought in
from the Continent’.35 Gaumont-British attracted an unusually large
number, including both Werndorff and Alfred Junge, who were the most
respected and influential art directors of their time. If they (and others)
brought a ‘German style’36 to Gaumont-British, they also may have
prompted a greater awareness of international politics at the studio. In
the mid-s, for example, some of the studio’s most prominent German
émigrés were involved in the making of I was a Spy () and Jew Suss
(), films which bypassed censorship by using historical settings to
dramatize stories centred on German militarism and anti-Semitism.37
However influential the German émigrés may have been, the presence
of the Englishman Ivor Montagu as an associate producer at Gaumont-
British must also have been pivotal. Montagu’s influence is suspected
partly because he was a communist and an anti-fascist in the s, and
THE 39 STEPS 24

therefore had an interest in promoting political stories; and also because

he was an expert on dealing with the British Board of Film Censors
(BBFC). He had fought lengthy battles with the censors, notably on
their decision not to allow Soviet films such as Battleship Potemkin ()
and Mother () to be screened for the general public in Britain. He
even published an influential pamphlet on ‘The Political Censorship of
Films’ in .38 Thus, he was better schooled than most on the techniques
of navigating through the censors’ regulations and their blindspots. As
the producer in charge of Hitchcock’s production unit, Montagu’s ex-
pertise was called into play.
The BBFC was unlikely to approve any film that portrayed current
international tensions or even a film that portrayed a foreign country in
a less than favourable light. Indeed, the censors’ governing principle
was that feature films should entertain rather than raise controversies,
and they were not alone in this perception of cinema. One of Gaumont-
British’s own executives, C. M. Woolf, reportedly objected to the script
for The  Steps and tried to stop its production. His suggestion was that
the Hitchcock production team should be put to work on a light musical
(either Lily of Laguna or The Floradora Girl ) instead.39 This did not
come to pass, but it highlights the tensions that existed not only within
the industry but within this one company. It is all the more remarkable,
then, that The  Steps makes it clear that its setting is the present day
(as opposed to the  setting of Buchan’s book), that there is a con-
temporary threat to peace, that this threat comes from a sinister foreign
power, and that it is aimed directly at a complacently unaware Britain.
The film makes these points largely through implication, of course; but,
as the film historian James Robertson has suggested, this was because
Montagu realized that the BBFC could be circumvented only ‘by stealth
rather than head-on clashes’.40
In fact, when the the censors read the script for The  Steps, they did
not even comment on its portrayal of espionage and international in-
trigue; they considered the story ‘a harmless melodrama with various
improbable adventures’. The ‘A’ (for ‘adult’) rating that the film received
was entirely related to the film’s risqué jokes and suggestive situations.41
If they had been a little bit more attentive, the censors may have noticed
how pointedly aware the film is of its own status as ‘harmless entertain-
ment’. But, as Montagu understood, they were remarkably blind to
implication and reacted only to the direct and overtly censorable.
PRODUCTION CONTEXT 25

WRITING THE SCRIPT

The screenplay for The  Steps is credited in a manner that appears

very orderly, and as though a clear division of labour governed the
writing process. Charles Bennett receives a credit for ‘adaptation’, Alma
Reville for ‘continuity’ and Ian Hay for ‘dialogue’. However, there
were more than three contributors to the script and their roles were not
so neatly defined. Ivor Montagu recalled years later that Hitchcock was
central to the writing process and that Angus MacPhail was also a
contributor. Montagu himself took part too, and he remembered lively
story conferences that took place in the living room of the Hitchcocks’
flat on Cromwell Road (in London):
The story conferences were a feast of fancy and dialectic, a mixture of
composing crosswords and solving them, both laced with humour. We
would sit around his flat. Sometimes Alma would be there, sometimes
the scenario editor Angus MacPhail … The unfolding story was elabor-
ated with suggestions from all of us; everything was welcomed if not
always agreed. In the end the scripts were by consensus; the only special
privilege their credited authors had was to write them down. The scenes
were of course finalised by Hitch and his verbal texts then duplicated
from the writers’ notes. Mick [Michael Balcon] never interfered. He
simply created the conditions and confidence for us to work.42
Other accounts of the scriptwriting process also indicate that the
production team was given a free hand to develop the script, and that
the writing process was characterized by teamwork and long hours.
There were also some indulgent moments. While working on The 
Steps, for example, Hitchcock is said to have rented a -seat steamboat
and taken his writers out on a Thames cruise ‘as a stimulant’ for them.
Charles Bennett recalled working lunches at the Mayfair Hotel, evening
sessions accompanied by cocktails back at the Cromwell Road flat, as
well as working vacations in Saint Moritz, Switzerland.43
The idea of a lively, creative and collaborative writing process is
undermined only by Charles Bennett’s insistence that so many of the
films’ key ideas, characters and situations were his alone. In an interview
with Patrick McGilligan, Bennett insisted that Hitchcock was ‘totally
incapable of creating or developing a story’ and that he was ‘never a
constructionist, never a storyteller’. According to Bennett, Hitchcock
thought of visually dramatic situations and then his writers faced the
problem of ‘how the hell to get these into the story’. With regard to The
THE 39 STEPS 26

 Steps, Bennett readily admitted that he did not write all of the
dialogue, but he was eager to take credit for nearly every other aspect
of the film, including the casting of Frederick Piper as the milkman,
inventing the character of Mr Memory, and creating the basic structure
of the story: ‘In general, without me in the pictures I worked on with
Hitch, there wouldn’t have been any story. I think it’s as simple as that.
I would take a story and turn it into something good.’44 He also insisted
that Hitchcock’s wife, Alma Reville, was listed in the credits only so that
Hitchcock could derive another salary from the studio. ‘She never did
a damned thing,’ Bennett said. ‘Alma had nothing to do with The 
Steps at all.’45
It is not difficult to refute some of these claims. Mr Memory was not
Bennett’s ‘invention’. The character was based upon a real music-hall
performer named Datas, who was still known (or at least remembered)
when the film was made. And Alma Reville was certainly not a housewife
who had been slipped on to the payroll. She was an experienced film
editor before she met Hitchcock, and prior to The  Steps she had
worked as an assistant director or screenwriter on eight of her husband’s
films. She also worked on films made by others. In the same year as The
 Steps, for example, Reville worked on the screenplay of another
Gaumont-British film, The Passing of the Third Floor Back (),
directed by Berthold Viertel. But Bennett’s wider claims, about his own
importance and centrality, are more difficult to prove or disprove because
so little has survived of the original script materials. Hitchcock’s collected
papers do include a script for The  Steps, but it is a dialogue-only script
that was written by Ian Hay. Like John Buchan, Hay was a Scottish
writer who had worked in government propaganda during the First
World War. He proved to be an excellent choice for the film – the witty
and sharp dialogue is one of its greatest assets – but it is apparent that
Hay was brought in to work on the dialogue and the dialogue alone.
There is nothing else in the script.46 And this is the one part of the
scripting process that is not in dispute. Even Charles Bennett was willing
to admit that ‘Ian Hay wrote some lovely dialogue’.47
Bennett considered himself a story constructionist, the architect of
the story, who gives the story a beginning, middle and end, and makes
sure that all its components fit together and that the story never ‘wanders’
or ‘wallows’.48 These qualities are evident in the earliest films Bennett
and Hitchcock collaborated on, The Man Who Knew Too Much and The
 Steps, but it is worth remembering how much of their dramatic
structure and concerns came from Buchan.49 Whether he was working
PRODUCTION CONTEXT 27

alone or within a team of writers, Bennett was essentially refashioning

Buchan’s stories for the cinema and for the modern era. Furthermore,
Bennett and the other writers were clearly influenced by a wide and
interesting array of films. One was Fritz Lang’s Spione (). The on-
stage denouement of Spione, in which the villain shoots himself before
an audience that responds by applauding, foreshadows Professor Jordan’s
show-stopping leap on to the stage of the London Palladium in The 
Steps. Spione also shows a bullet stopped by a book, a situation enhanced
in The  Steps by making the book a hymnbook and situating it next
to Hannay’s heart. The romantic dimension of The  Steps, meanwhile,
was clearly influenced by two of Hollywood’s earliest screwball com-
edies, W. S. Van Dyke’s The Thin Man () and Frank Capra’s It
Happened One Night ().50 The screwball comedy’s bantering romantic
relationships, containing more acrimony than affection, came across as
fresh, liberated and entirely modern in . They offered a blueprint
for films in which romance is presented in terms of slapstick rather than
sentiment, the characters are mocking rather than mawkish towards one
another, and even the most domineering man meets his match in a woman
who refuses to be cowed. In The Thin Man, husband and wife Nick and
Nora Charles trade wisecracks while investigating a murder mystery
that, despite the humour, has ominous and truly suspenseful moments.
In , this was an unusual generic mix, and one that proved very
popular. It Happened One Night seems a larger influence on The  Steps
because its bickering couple are forced to take a cross-country journey
together, and it is only under these circumstances that they eventually
cease hostilities and fall in love. This scenario is taken even further in
The  Steps by having the couple in handcuffs, and by delaying any
demonstration of affection until the very last shot of the film. Both of
these films were on release in London in the autumn of , and it is
plain to see that the makers of The  Steps admired and learned from
them.

PRE-PRODUCTION

When Michael Balcon read an early and incomplete draft of the script
in November , he immediately recognized it as ‘first class’ and ‘an
obvious international proposition’. With the company’s sights set on
the American market, he was particularly concerned that the dialogue
should ‘avoid all phrases which are purely of importance to a British
audience’ and also worried that the police uniforms and the scenes on
THE 39 STEPS 28

. Madeleine Carroll, Alma Reville and Alfred Hitchcock on the set at the
Shepherd’s Bush studios. (Source: BFI Films: Stills, Posters and
Designs)

the train would seem ‘very foreign to an American audience’.51 A more

pressing concern was that the film’s production values should not seem
inferior to those of Hollywood. In the previous year, The Man Who
Knew Too Much had been produced at a cost of only £,, and it was
not difficult to detect the budgetary constraints in the film itself. The
opening scene’s location footage and alpine backdrops were particularly
crude and, as the American trade paper Variety stated, the film’s cast
(led by Leslie Banks and Edna Best) was unknown outside Britain.
According to Variety, this meant that in the USA the film was suitable
only for neighbourhood cinemas and double bills.52 Gaumont-British
had much higher aspirations for its films than this, and in December
 Balcon made it clear to the company’s board of directors that these
aspirations would not be met unless production budgets were raised. He
thought that reaching a Hollywood standard would require film costs of
between £, and £,. Even then, he told them, gaining a foot-
hold in the United States ‘would be a contest of David and Goliath’.53
At this time, when the script for The  Steps was still unfinished, its
PRODUCTION CONTEXT 29

budget was set at only £,.54 Although this represented an extra

£, over the cost of The Man Who Knew Too Much, it was still well
below the threshold set by Balcon. Some special circumstances can be
seen to account for the lower budget. One surprisingly inexpensive item
proved to be the screen rights to John Buchan’s story, which cost only
£. Apparently, its value as a film property had waned after nineteen
years in print.55 This first budget also included the salary of only one star,
Robert Donat, and Donat alone was likely to account for much of the
extra £,. Having already established his name in the internationally
successful British film The Private Life of Henry VIII () and in the
Hollywood production of The Count of Monte Cristo (), Donat’s
presence atop the cast list would be integral to marketing the film in the
United States. The part of Pamela, meanwhile, was meant to go to Jane
Baxter, a much less well known British actress, who would have been
paid only £.56 It is unclear what happened next. The publicized but
somewhat unlikely story is that Baxter asked to be released in order to
take a co-starring role in a BIP film.57 It seems more likely that as the
script developed and the part of Pamela grew more important, it was
decided that an actress of greater standing was needed. Madeleine Carroll
was one of Britain’s better known actresses, and her career had recently
taken a decisive upturn with leading roles in Gaumont-British’s I was a
Spy () and in the Hollywood historical drama The World Moves On
(). With both Donat and Carroll as stars, The  Steps became the
most commercially promising of all of Gaumont-British’s films.
Carroll’s £, salary took the budget considerably higher, and it
continued climbing until it finally reached £,. These budget in-
creases were planned and approved, and so it appears that C. M. Woolf ’s
hostility to the film was not shared by others at Gaumont-British.58
Another demonstration of this was the decision to send a second unit to
Scotland to obtain location footage rather than relying entirely on painted
studio backdrops, models and stock footage. A further indication of
the studio’s largesse is the film’s first-rate cast. In addition to the stars,
The  Steps has a particularly impressive line-up of co-stars, and this
is an important consideration given the film’s picaresque structure and
the need for each vignette to be vividly realized. Peggy Ashcroft, who
was already a well-known stage actress, took the part of the crofter’s
wife and gave an intensely affecting performance. Lucie Mannheim had
been one of Germany’s best-known actresses before she was forced into
exile by the Nazis, and her portrayal of Annabella Smith brought just
the right mix of exoticism and danger to the role. Godfrey Tearle, a
THE 39 STEPS 30

. Robert Donat, Madeleine Carroll and Alfred Hitchcock talking on the

set. (Source: Jerry Ohlinger’s Movie Material Store)

veteran of both stage and screen, was effectively cast against type as the
villain, Professor Jordan. Together with John Laurie (the crofter) and
Wylie Watson (Mr Memory), this cast represents the best that Hitchcock
had been given so far in his career, and perhaps one of the best he would
ever have.
Ivor Montagu recalled that, despite the extra expenses and the studio’s
apparent generosity, in one key respect Hitchcock was actually a very
economical filmmaker. His method of ‘storyboarding’ a film – that is,
drawing the key shots and scenes on paper before filming begins – is well
known, and it is usually recalled as a sign of how visually aware the
director was. However, storyboarding was also an economical method
of planning set design, lighting, costumes and camera placement before
reaching the studio floor, where every hour added significantly to the
production cost.59 Eighteen drawings prepared for The  Steps have
survived and are held at the British Film Institute.60 These were drawn
by the film’s art director, Oscar Werndorff, and they demonstrate the
careful planning that went into the film’s visual dimension, particularly
the attention paid to the lighting of scenes. Werndorff described art
direction itself as ‘writing with light’:
PRODUCTION CONTEXT 31

the art director has to design and to build with light and for light. Every
alteration of the position of objects in the background, as well as the
foreground, can entirely alter the whole effect of a scene in perspective.
The angle chosen to photograph a piece of furniture, a room, or a
person decides the character of the picture on screen. By altering the
lines or the lighting of a scene, or even its colour, you emphasize or
detract from its importance in the sequence and in the whole story.61

The drawings certainly bear witness to Werndorff ’s views. Each gives

a very strong sense of the lighting and, by extension, the mood of the
scene. Note, for example, the drawing of Hannay’s kitchen (picture no.
), which perfectly captures the sleek, bright, white and coldly antiseptic
feeling that is so strongly conveyed in the film, and compare this with
the gloomy, claustrophobic and somewhat surreal design of the crofter’s
bedroom (picture no. ). Because these two drawings do not include
figures or any indication of movement, they are better defined as set
design drawings rather than as storyboards. Picture no.  is an example
of a true storyboard, indicating the framing of a particular shot, the
placement of the characters, and the set design and lighting of a scene
in which Hannay is pursued across the moors. A comparison of this
drawing with a production still from the scene (picture no. ) indicates
just how closely the storyboards were followed on the set.62 The drawing
of Hannay’s living room (picture no. ), with Hannay and Annabella
Smith standing in the doorway, is another nearly identical indication of
a specific shot. The lighting, props and staging appear in the film almost
exactly as they do in the drawing, and Annabella Smith’s costume is just
as it appears in the film, including the tilt of her hat and her thick fur-
lined collar.
Not everything, of course, went so exactly to plan. Picture no.  is
in some respects a close approximation of the scene on the Forth Bridge,
but the scene does not take place at night or in quite the manner en-
visaged in the drawing. Picture no. , meanwhile, represents what was
intended to be the first three shots of the film, establishing that the
setting is London and, more specifically, a rather dingy music hall within
London. The first shot, showing a pair of hands leafing through a
photographic ‘Guide to London’, was probably considered too close to
the very similar opening shot of The Man Who Knew Too Much.63 The
second shot may have been considered confusing because it makes the
music hall appear antiquated; a much more modern sign was used
instead. Only the third shot was used in the film, and, again, it is
THE 39 STEPS 32

. Oscar Werndorff ’s bright, white set design for Richard Hannay’s

kitchen. (Source: BFI Films: Stills, Posters and Designs)

. The warped and claustrophobic set design for the bedroom of the crofter’s
cottage. (Source: BFI Films: Stills, Posters and Designs)
PRODUCTION CONTEXT 33

. The storyboard for a shot of Hannay being pursued across the moors.
(Source: BFI Films: Stills, Posters and Designs)

. The shot as realized on the set, although it was not used in the finished
film. (Source: BFI Films: Stills, Posters and Designs)
THE 39 STEPS 34

. The storyboard for the shot of Hannay and Annabella arriving at his
flat. It would be realized in the film almost exactly as it is pictured here.
(Source: BFI Films: Stills, Posters and Designs)

. The storyboard for a scene on the Forth Bridge. The scene was shot on
location (in Hertfordshire) rather than in the studio, and the result was
quite different from the way it is pictured here. (Source: BFI Films:
Stills, Posters and Designs)
PRODUCTION CONTEXT 35

. The storyboards for the planned first three shots of the film; only the
third shot would be used in the finished film. (Source: BFI Films:
Stills, Posters and Designs)

remarkable how closely the actual shot resembles the drawing. Details
such as the security grille, the price list and wallpaper are seen in the
film exactly as they are pictured here.
As Werndorff readily admitted, such designs and effects were not
created by the art director alone but usually resulted from ‘heart-breaking
arguments with the producer, the director and dozens of other col-
laborators’.64 In the case of The  Steps, these arguments were likely to
include not only Montagu and Hitchcock, but also Bernard Knowles
and Joe Strassner. Knowles, the director of photography, transferred
these intentions from paper to film, creating remarkably elaborate visual
compositions and detailed lighting effects; while Strassner, the costume
designer, was clearly a key member of the creative team for a film in
which female apparel is so carefully chosen and presented. Like Wern-
dorff, the musical director Louis Levy also remembered his collaboration
with Hitchcock as close and creative:
THE 39 STEPS 36

In his practical way he [Hitchcock] has time and time again worked out
with me a job the music has to do in the particular film on which we
were engaged … Hitchcock has always insisted that music should take
its proper place in the production of the film, just like the selection of
stars, the design of the sets, costumes and so on. With Hitchcock the
musical score is conceived in conjunction with its story and not as an
afterthought.65

Hence, Levy wrote not only the dramatic backing score for The 
Steps, which moves freely along with the film’s ominous and lighthearted
moments, but also Mr Memory’s theme tune, which is so well integrated
into the story.

FILMING

For Hitchcock it was important that the film was ‘made on paper’ before
filming began, and that as little as possible was left to chance or improvisa-
tion.66 Yet this was not entirely possible with The  Steps. Charles
Bennett had accompanied Hitchcock and Alma Reville on a Christmas
vacation in Saint Moritz in order to continue working on the script, but
it was still not finished when filming began at the Shepherd’s Bush
studios on  January . There were at least two aspects of the script
that remained incomplete. First, the part of Pamela was a small one until
Madeleine Carroll was cast in the role after filming had begun; the part
was then ‘built up on the set’, according to Hitchcock, and ‘it turned out
to be considerably more important at the end than we had originally
intended’.67 Second, the details of the film’s climax had yet to be worked
out, and even as filming began there was speculation that the climax
might take place on Big Ben rather than at the London Palladium.68
Thus, when a reporter from Kinematograph Weekly visited Lime Grove
in the first week of filming, he found Charles Bennett at the studio and
‘busy [working] on the story’. The scene in the East End music hall was
being shot that first week, and Bennett ‘hinted at dark and sinister
international plottings cloaked by this part of the story’. The reporter
was impressed by the scale of the music-hall set and its authenticity.
There was a large audience of extras, real tobacco fumes and the sound
of ‘Guinness cork poppings’ in the background. Wylie Watson’s appear-
ance as Mr Memory, it was noted, was very similar to the real ‘Datas’,
upon whom the character was based; and Bernard Knowles was busy
shooting the scene in several different ways.69
PRODUCTION CONTEXT 37

. From left to right, Penrose Tennyson, Madeleine Carroll, Robert

Donat, Alfred Hitchcock and an unidentified assistant (holding the
script) rehearse the scene in which Hannay and Pamela escape from
the spies. (Source: BFI Films: Stills, Posters and Designs)

Hitchcock’s desire to stick closely to the film that was made on paper
(at least so far as this was developed) and avoid improvisation on the set
would seem to indicate the need to maintain absolute control. This may
in turn explain the many reports of his odd behaviour on the set.
Whenever he finished with a cup of tea, for example, he threw the
teacup over his shoulder and let it shatter on the floor. He referred to
Robert Donat as ‘Mr Doughnut’, and Madeleine Carroll, who was
originally from Birmingham, was summoned on to the set by Hitchcock
with the loud demand, ‘Bring on the Birmingham tart!’ On the first day
that Donat and Carroll appeared on set together, he had them put in the
handcuffs that they would be wearing throughout most of their scenes
together, ostensibly for a rehearsal, but then pretended that the key had
been lost. Donat and Carroll, who had not met before, were then forced
to spend hours bound to one another.70 This served the purpose of
breaking the ice between the actors (and Donat and Carroll are reported
to have embarked on a ‘torrid affair’),71 but all of these displays of
temperament were also ways for the director to exert his authority and
THE 39 STEPS 38

pre-eminence on set. Certainly, no one else was allowed to waste time

or act up. When Robert Donat and Peggy Ashcroft got into a fit of
giggles during the filming of a scene at the crofter’s cottage, Hitchcock
responded by smashing a bulb in a studio lamp.72
Much has been written about the rough treatment that Madeleine
Carroll received while filming the scene set on the Scottish moors at
night. Her character is dragged along in handcuffs by Donat, pushed
behind a waterfall, over a stream, through fences and so on until she is
exhausted and bedraggled. Hitchcock has said that the indignities were
designed at least in part to overcome Carroll’s self-consciousness in
front of the camera. He thought that she tried too hard to be ‘ladylike ’,
and that her previous roles, most of which were in costume dramas, had
shown her as ‘cold, unfeeling [and] humourless’.73 Hence, the roughness
of the scenes on the moors was meant to strip Carroll of her poise and
dignity, and to establish a more modern and less class-bound character
than she had played in the past. Yet the scenes are often taken as evidence
of Hitchcock’s misogyny.74 What seems to be forgotten in such accounts
is that the indignities are a part of a story that puts both of its characters,
male and female, through the wringer. Moreover, no one has suggested
that Carroll was seriously hurt. Ivor Montagu remembered that through-
out it all she was a ‘trouper’ and that she ‘turned the tables on us by
appreciating this treatment and asking for more’.75 Donat recalled that
while filming one of the rougher moments, when they become caught
up in a fence, he and Carroll broke up laughing and the scene had to be
retaken.76 And in the roughest moments, a double was used in place of
Carroll; the double being Penrose Tennyson, the great-grandson of
Lord Alfred Tennyson, and also the film’s assistant director. Tennyson
is said to have donned a blonde wig, high-heeled shoes and a dress in
order to spare the actress from the worst of her character’s ordeal.77
The last scene to be filmed at Shepherd’s Bush was the finale at the
London Palladium, which was re-created in the studio even though the
actual Palladium was only two miles away. Presumably, the expense of
renting the Palladium (and filling it with extras) was too high. When
these scenes were completed in the last week of February, filming at
Shepherd’s Bush was finished after eight weeks.78 Production then had
to move on because the inner-city Shepherd’s Bush studio had no backlot,
no standing street or town sets, and no facilities for filming outside.
Hence, the cast and crew moved to Welwyn Studios in Hertfordshire,
where a standing set of ‘London streets’ was adapted for use as the
streets of a provincial Scottish town where Hannay breaks out of the
PRODUCTION CONTEXT 39

sheriff ’s audience and hides by joining a Salvation Army parade. The

production then moved once again, but only down the road to Stapleford,
Hertfordshire, where a section of the Forth Bridge set was constructed
on a railway line and Robert Donat was filmed clinging to it.79 For the
majority of the crew and all of the cast, filming was completed at this
point in March . Only a second unit led by Penrose Tennyson was
dispatched to Scotland to shoot location footage. In the film, the map
indicates that Hannay is meant to be heading for the town of Killin, but
Killin must have been chosen only for the murderous sound of its name.
When it came time to choose actual locations, the Glencoe area (in the
north-west of Scotland) was preferred.80 Another month was spent on
editing and scoring the film and then, only seven months after work
began on the script, The  Steps was complete and ready to be shown.
 TWO
The 39 Steps

The title graphics show the words The  Steps rushing forward, with
a speed and sense of purpose that is characteristic of much of the film.
As the credits roll, Louis Levy’s score begins with the low rumbling of
drums and then moves on to alarmingly brassy horns and much lighter
orchestral flourishes. Thus, the tone is set for a film which will provide
a rollercoaster ride of suspense, surprises and humour, and a film which
will never stay in one place, with one mood, or in any one setting.
Remarkably for a British film of the s, it moves not only outside
London and the south-east, but also out of England and into the High-
lands of Scotland, revealing along the way a seedy East End music hall,
the grand London Palladium, a sleek city flat, a crofter’s cottage and an
imposing country home. The film moves as easily through different
segments of society as it does through the geographical regions, in-
corporating into its story the Cockney audience at the music hall, the
commercial travellers on the train, the miserably unhappy couple on a
remote Scottish farm, the landed gentry, an exotic foreign spy and an
elegant English lady. It is a film that moves with enough speed, then, to
offer a panoramic, unsentimental view of Britain and the British. It does
this not to make patriotic points or to observe the far-flung regions with
a documentarist’s eye. It moves to convey speed and to delight in
diversity and the breaking of barriers. It moves this way because that is
what cinema can do and should do, and yet it is what British cinema
seldom did in the early s. Hitchcock himself complained about
‘stodgy British pictures’ in an article written while The  Steps was
being made. He questioned why British films seemed to have a single
tone, why they had to be grave or gay, when a combination of ‘light and
shade’ can be so effective. He wondered why British films often seemed
stuck within a theatrical milieu of drawing rooms and middle-class
characters, while American films had a ‘freshness’ that derived from a
wider array of backgrounds, character types and dramatic tones. His call
THE 39 STEPS 41

for pictures about ‘telephone exchanges, icemen, newspaper reporters,

police cars, repair gangs, anything and everything under the sun’ was of
course a prescription for his latest film.1 And it should not be forgotten
that Hitchcock’s earlier films are not entirely free of the cinematic vices
he identified. If Buchan’s The Thirty-Nine Steps did nothing else for the
director, it encouraged him to make the story move and change.

THE MUSIC HALL

As the story opens, the music on the soundtrack abruptly changes to

something much tinnier. The film’s first shot explains this cheap and
cheerful music, but only gradually. The camera tracks along a series of
letters, spelling ‘M-u-s-i-c-H-a-l-l’, and each letter fills the frame and
lights up as the camera passes. It is a curious sort of address to the
audience. It acknowledges our presence, as the letters seem to light up
for our benefit, but the words are never seen in full and must be pieced
together at the camera’s pace. The ensuing shots within the music hall
continue to offer only the pieces of a puzzle. A shot of the box-office
is engulfed by shadow as a man buys a ticket. He is seen only from
behind and the framing is skewed. Then only his feet are seen as he
walks from the foyer and into the theatre, and the camera stays behind
him as he moves down the centre aisle and into his row. Just as he sits
down, a shot of the conductor cueing the orchestra signals that the
show will begin.
When the film was released, many critics complained about this odd
and unconventional beginning; and of course we know from the story-
boards that a clearer opening with more conventional establishing shots
was originally planned. The opening is, however, an entirely appropriate
beginning in that it warns the audience to pay attention, that puzzles lie
ahead, that clues will have to be gathered and considered. It is ap-
propriate, too, that the role of the camera should be emphasized from
the outset. There is an implicit awareness throughout the film of its own
parameters, of generic conventions, the limits of censorship and the
need to fulfil audience expectations. There is also a distinction drawn
between the old-fashioned experience of the music hall and the more
modern experience of the cinema. By , music hall was largely a
thing of the past, a form of entertainment that had been overtaken by
the cinema, and here the music-hall experience is re-created with some
affection but little nostalgia. Mr Memory’s ‘prodigious feats of memory’
may be impressive, but he is a nervous and unattractive performer, and
THE 39 STEPS 42

the audience ’s participation in his act is more disruptive than sym-

pathetic. By contrast, the cinema audience is meant to be quiet and
attentive, and involved in the intensity and immediacy of the experience.
It can lose itself in the fictional world of the story and particularly
through its identification with an attractive and dynamic protagonist.
The presence of Robert Donat as the film’s star holds out the promise
of this type of protagonist. Donat represents a clear break with Hitch-
cock’s previous male leads, such as Herbert Marshall (Murder!) and Leslie
Banks (The Man Who Knew Too Much), who had a higher social standing
and less charisma. On both counts, they were less likely to appeal to
audiences. That Donat is meant to be taken as an attractive Everyman,
or at least as a representative of the cinema audience, is signalled by the
opening in which he goes through the same motions that the cinema
audience has just been through: buying a ticket and taking a seat. His
distinction and desirability, meanwhile, are conveyed by the stylish cut of
his clothes and his handsome profile. He is clearly marked as the film’s
star, not least because the camera has singled him out for attention and
the show does not begin until he has arrived. Yet the camera also
withholds a full and sustained view of him. We see him in pieces (his
hands and his feet) as he enters the theatre, and then only a brief glimpse
of his profile as he takes his seat. Then the stage show is seen in shots
that are taken from his approximate position in the audience, but there
are no reaction shots, or shots of his face at all, for several minutes. We
are being teased rather than gratified, and this teasing only builds up the
desire for a charismatic, central and fully formed figure.
At the outset of the film, Hannay is none of these things. He can be
described in the very same terms that Hitchcock used to describe the
modern audience. Hannay, too, is ‘sluggish and jellified’. Like the cinema
audience watching the film, he expects to take his seat and be entertained,
to experience thrills but also to remain at a safe distance from them. In
the cinema, the safety lies in the fact that the entertainment is filmed and
fictional, and also that it is made to follow certain conventions and rules
(the rules of censorship, for example). Yet when Hannay enters the
music hall that safety and distance are taken away. The live performance
is not predictable and controlled, and the show spills out into the audi-
ence and demands that he takes part. The distinction between the world
of entertainment and the world of espionage collapses for Hannay, and
he is forced to leave behind his complacent assumption that danger,
disorder and duplicity are the stuff of entertainment rather than real
life. He is remarkably reluctant to do this. ‘I’m a nobody’, he says at an
THE 39 STEPS 43

early point in the film, and for him that seems to mean that he can stay
detached, remain passive, and turn to higher authorities when faced
with a real problem. The story-line, however, relentlessly pushes him
into the thick of things, and as he becomes more engaged and dynamic,
the cinema audience is increasingly encouraged to identify with him.
Our own detachment dissolves as we simultaneously see the world from
Hannay’s point of view and marvel at his own prodigious feats. The
story that seeks to awaken Hannay is meant to wake the audience too.
As soon as Mr Memory walks out on stage, a baby begins crying
somewhere in the smoky, shabby theatre. It is obvious that he does
not have (or understand) the appeal of an Everyman. He is given a
grandiose introduction and wears formal attire, but his sweaty brow and
nervous manner indicate that it is all pretence, and the Cockney audience
sees right through it. When the master of ceremonies refers to his ‘pro-
digious feats of memory’, an elderly woman cries out, ‘His feet ain’t
half so big as yours, cully!’ Mr Memory’s act invites the audience to
release its own preoccupations into the public sphere, and the result is
a stream of anti-social impulses. A crane shot from the back of the stalls
towards the front reveals, as if at random, what is on the audience ’s
mind. Whether the questions centre on murder (‘When was Crippen
hanged?’), nationalism and fighting (‘Who was the last British heavy-
weight champion of the world?’) or sex and celebrity (‘How old is Mae
West?’), they demonstrate the audience’s desire for diversion into the
fantastic. A much more mundane question comes from a weedy,
spectacled and middle-aged man, who politely asks, ‘What causes pip in
poultry?’ Much to the amusement of the rest of the audience, his lean
and severe wife instantly admonishes him with the line, ‘Don’t make
yourself so common!’, and a laugh at their expense ripples through the
audience. The question and the responses to it neatly encapsulate a
cluster of ideas central to the film. First, the question is a practical one,
and it is rejected in favour of the more distracting and entertaining
questions, just as all important matters are ignored or belittled in the
course of the story. Second, the concept of ‘pip in poultry’ is one that
suggests a subversion or rottenness from within, and although the man
asking the question does not realize it, Mr Memory himself is involved
in an attempt at subversion. Third, ‘pip’ may be an actual poultry disease
but it is also a slang term for venereal disease, and the link between
subversion and sexuality that is initiated here runs throughout the film.
The power play that is at the heart of the story – one nation seeking to
weaken, dominate and control another – is paralleled in everyday sexual
THE 39 STEPS 44

relationships, including that of the timid husband who dares to ask this
question and the wife who so swiftly rebukes him. There is indeed ‘pip
in poultry’, even if few in the audience are ready to take it seriously.
The first full sighting of Donat comes when he asks Mr Memory,
‘How far is Winnipeg from Montreal?’ If this is a reassuring moment
for the cinema audience – at last, a point of identification is found amid
this mob – it is quickly taken away. An audience member interrupts
with another question and the attention of Mr Memory (and the camera)
is diverted. When Hannay asks his question again, Mr Memory’s initial
response, ‘Miss Winnie who, sir?’, emphasizes the distinction between
Hannay’s geographical question and the audience’s ribaldry. Hannay
states his question for a third time and Mr Memory welcomes him as ‘a
gentleman from Canada’, a label that paradoxically indicates both his
higher social standing (as a gentleman) and his classlessness (as a North
American). But Hannay’s polite question and Mr Memory’s elaborate
reply makes the crowd even more restless. The repeated demand to
know Mae West’s age somehow leads to a fight breaking out, and the
fighting quickly spreads through the stalls. The master of ceremonies
appears on stage with Mr Memory, and bellows out ‘Gentlemen! Gentle-
man, please! You are not home!’ It is an admonition that highlights the
film’s rather bleak view of human nature, and what goes on in homes,
and also the notion that what goes on in homes is unsuitable for the
public arena. Entertainment, in the minds of bodies such as the BBFC,
is meant to distract or to improve, but it is not to reflect the ordinary,
the mundane or the real. Hence, it is the location of the fight that is
objected to and not the fight itself.
The music-hall audience accept the fight as routine and unremarkable
until, in the midst of the fracas, there is a sudden, extreme close-up of
a gloved hand firing a pistol twice. The shots cause a sudden panic. As
the crowd begins to stampede towards the exits, the camera is placed at
eye level and directly in their path, so that the stampede is coming right
towards the screen and the cinema audience. The reverse shot shows
that the crowd is actually stampeding towards the female ushers, an
elderly woman and a young girl, who are pushed out of the way. It is
a brutal scene, and it is shot in a manner that captures its ugliness, but
Mr Memory insists that the orchestra should begin playing again. The
sound of a pretty tune, he thinks, can quell any commotion. Hannay,
meanwhile, is seen to be exiting calmly and, amid the jostling of the
crowd, he is pushed into Annabella Smith. It is our first sighting of her,
and she appears distinctly out of place in the music hall. She is attractive
THE 39 STEPS 45

and well dressed, and has an air of exoticism that stems from her
combination of mystery and elegance: her hair is dark, she wears a
black coat with a thick fur collar and a black hat with a veil that partially
covers her face. As she and Hannay leave the theatre, they begin to go
their separate ways, but Annabella pulls Hannay back towards her and
asks, rather too intensely, ‘May I come home with you?’ When the
sheepish Hannay asks, ‘What’s the idea?’, her answer, ‘Well, I’d like to’,
is not very convincing. ‘It’s your funeral’, he replies, and what seems to
be passive acquiescence turns out to be a prediction of sorts. She does
not leave Hannay’s flat alive.
Hannay and Annabella cross the road to catch a bus, and just as they
board it, Alfred Hitchcock and Charles Bennett can be seen walking
along the pavement from the left to the right of the frame, blocking the
view of the couple.2 It is a quick cameo, but in some respects a fitting and
revealing one. It seems to offer Bennett some share of the credit for the
film. (To my knowledge, none of Hitchcock’s other writers ever shared
in his cameo appearances or made one of their own.) The bus itself is
also significant. As a boy, Hitchcock is said to have memorized public
transport timetables and to have ridden London’s buses and trams as a
hobby. Not surprisingly, then, he has carefully chosen the the number 
bus, which to this day runs from the eastern fringe of London, where
Hitchcock grew up, through the East End and on to Oxford Circus in
the heart of the West End (near Portland Place and Hannay’s flat). Thus,
we have the suggestion that this setting and crowd are well known to the
director. The atmosphere of the down-at-heel music hall is certainly
rendered vividly and, as we have seen, the character of Mr Memory was
based on the real music-hall performer Datas, who performed a similar
act in similar venues. But if the director is claiming this territory as his
own, or at least signalling his special knowledge of it, he is not celebrating
it at all. For as he passes through the frame, he litters it rather flagrantly.
It is an extravagant gesture – throwing down a piece of white rubbish
(a cigarette packet perhaps) in the direction of the camera – and one that
is meant to be noticed. It also seems an appropriately selfish, complacent
and anti-social action, given the behaviour we have just witnessed in the
music hall, and the events which lie in store.

H A N N AY ’ S F L AT

When Hannay and Annabella return to his flat, it offers few clues about
his character. The building is grand and sleekly modern (for ), but
THE 39 STEPS 46

Hannay’s own impermanence there is signalled by the register of resid-

ents’ names in the lobby. Whereas all of the other names are stencilled
on to the sign, Hannay’s name is merely on a tacked-up piece of paper.
He tells Annabella that he is ‘only over here from Canada for a few
months’, but we never learn what purpose or connections he might have
in Britain, or what life he might have back in Canada. The flat itself is
virtually barren. ‘The decorators have been in,’ he says, explaining why
it seems uninhabited. In the sitting room (seen just as it was pictured in
the storyboards), street light shines through the curtainless windows,
revealing that the few pieces of furniture are all covered in sheets. The
only visible furnishing is a mirror, which reflects this eerie emptiness.
Annabella, wary of her pursuers, asks that the light be kept off until she
is seated out of sight of the windows, and then asks Hannay to turn the
mirror to the wall. As he does so, their reflections can be seen fleetingly
before the mirror is turned completely to the wall and their images
obliterated. If this signals the end of Annabella, it must also signal
Hannay’s new beginning.
Hannay’s passivity and blankness contrast sharply with Annabella’s
air of mystery and danger, and also with the active role that she is
taking in the story. She informs Hannay that she fired the gun in the
music hall; that she did so to create a diversion so that she could escape
from two men who had spotted her following them; and that she is
trying to prevent ‘a secret vital to your air defence’ from being taken
out of the country by ‘a very brilliant agent of a certain foreign power’.
She also insists that she works for England only because ‘it pays better
that way’, but it is not entirely clear whether this is truly the case. When
she has been stabbed and is on the verge of death, she indicates that she
wants Hannay to carry on her work, and once she is dead, the words
that she speaks in Hannay’s mind act as a catalyst for his actions. None
of this seems to fit her claim to be a mercenary. Hannay, however, is
preoccupied with the idea that she may be sexually promiscuous, and he
refuses to contemplate the more disturbing scenario she reveals to him.
When she suggests that her name is Annabella, he flippantly replies,
‘Annabella Smith? Clergyman’s daughter, I suppose.’ And when she
worries that two men from the music hall may have followed her back
to the flat, Hannay jokingly admonishes her, ‘You should be more careful
choosing your men friends.’
It seems to be forgotten, meanwhile, that this meeting originally
promised a sexual encounter. When they retreat into the kitchen, the
atmosphere of the clean, bright and white kitchen is anything but
THE 39 STEPS 47

. Annabella Smith tries to warn Hannay about the man with the
missing finger. (Source: BFI Films: Stills, Posters and Designs)

seductive, and Hannay keeps on his overcoat throughout the entire scene,
suggesting a chill in the air. He makes not the slightest attempt to seduce
Annabella and instead cooks a meal for her. This sexual role reversal is
quite stark. Hannay cooks haddock at the stove and cuts bread at the
table, while she sits waiting for her meal, speaking of espionage, and
trying to convince him of the danger around him. It is only when, at her
urging, he goes to look out of the front window and sees that there are
two men standing watch on the street below that he stops joking. Even
then, his attitude is far from alarmed. ‘Have you ever heard of the thirty-
nine steps?’ she asks. ‘What’s that, a pub?’ he replies flatly. She also
warns him about the clever and ruthless leader of the spies, who ‘has a
dozen names and can look like a hundred people’, except for his one
distinguishing feature: the top joint of his little finger is missing. To
emphasize her warning, Annabella takes Hannay’s hand, and in a close-
up we see her hold the top joint of his little finger as she says, ‘So if you
should meet a man with no top joint there, be very careful my friend.’
The effect is to suggest a connection, and that this is his exact destiny,
even if he does not know it. When he offers her his bed, it is no surprise
THE 39 STEPS 48

that he volunteers to ‘get a shakedown on the couch’. Hannay’s slate is

so blank that he does not seem to have any sexual desire, and at any rate
Annabella – far from being a vulnerable damsel in distress – seems to
be in control. Her last request is for a map of Scotland, and the scene
fades out as he obediently goes to fetch one for her.
His transformation begins at the very moment that Annabella is
dying. He wakes in the night to find her staggering towards him, waving
a piece of paper and crying out, ‘Clear out, Hannay, they’ll get you
next!’ She falls over him, revealing that there is a knife sticking out of
her back, and the resulting image is a startling and paradoxical one. He
is sitting up on his elbows, with her body draped over his groin and an
erect knife protuding from her back. The effect is to suggest that this
image could be coming from his subconscious; that he has either dreamed
this event or willed it to happen. The placement of the dead woman
across his groin may signify his own impotence, both literal (because of
his lack of interest in sleeping with her) and figurative (his failure to
protect her). But the image can also suggest something more sinister: his
own misogynistic desire to harm her. Either way, as his facial expression
indicates, it is a moment of revelation for him. He had perhaps thought
of Annabella as a Mae West type, using her sex appeal to play a con-
trick on him, or as one of the emasculating wives of the music hall. The
image before him now, however, demonstrates that his idle assumptions
were entirely wrong, and it is the moment at which his impotence,
purposelessness and complacency collide, pointing him towards a pur-
pose and goal. Hannay is just beginning to wake up.
The camera is not quite ready to take on his perspective, however.
Prior to Annabella’s murder there have been only two point-of-view
shots,3 and Hannay’s point of view has continued to be elusive; suggested
rather than demonstrated, and implied rather than proven. This con-
tinues immediately after the murder. The telephone begins ringing
incessantly, and it is natural to assume that a close shot of it is from his
point of view. As the shot is held, however, he backs into the frame
from an unexpected direction. This changes our perspective on the shot
and, momentarily at least, on him too. After all, it is his own bread knife
that is sticking out of Annabella’s back, and he is wiping her blood from
his hands. Could such a passive man have committed so gruesome a
crime? And how can a sympathetic protagonist have a murdered woman
in his flat and blood on his hands?
The answer comes with the succession of point-of-view shots that
follow. As Hannay looks out of the window, the point-of-view shot of
THE 39 STEPS 49

. Annabella’s death is Hannay’s awakening. (Source: BFI Films:

Stills, Posters and Designs)

the men on the street below (at a phone box) and the sound of Hannay’s
persistently ringing telephone combine to convey his subjectivity. Then
Annabella’s face appears superimposed over this image, and she speaks
the same words that Hannay refused to take seriously earlier (‘What
you were laughing at just now is true … ’). It is clear that these are his
recollections, and that we can now see and hear his thoughts. He then
looks at her dead body and further subjective shots reveal that her hand
still clutches the map of Scotland and that a small hamlet named Alt-na-
Shellach has been circled on it. Annabella’s image appears on screen
once more, superimposed over the map, as Hannay recalls a jumble of
her words (‘There is a man in Scotland I must visit if anything is to be
done … I tell you these men act quickly, quickly, quickly … ’). Thus,
his point of view and purpose are at last established. Remarkably,
though, when Hannay’s subjectivity is at last manifested, it is Annabella
whom we see and hear. His identity appears to have been born as a
result of her death. Now, like Annabella, he will have to go on the run,
assume false identities and plead with strangers to believe his strange
and troubled tales. And, as with Annabella, we are left to wonder
THE 39 STEPS 50

whether he does this as a mercenary (to save himself ) or with some

higher motive (to save his country).

THE JOURNEY TO SCOTLAND

The scene in the flat fades out on Annabella’s last words (‘quickly,
quickly, quickly’), and these set the pace for the rest of the film. Hannay
must escape from his own building, but from the lobby he sees that
Annabella’s pursuers are still pacing back and forth outside. He goes to
the register of residents and moves his own sign to the ‘out’ position, and
then begins to pace back and forth in the same manner as the spies. If he
is going to escape from them, he seems to understand, then he will have
to leave his old identity behind and he will have to think and act like the
spies themselves. When the milkman arrives, he has the idea that he can
disguise himself in his uniform. At first, he tries to tell the milkman the
truth – there has been a murder upstairs, the men outside are spies, and
so on – but the milkman dismisses his ‘silly stories’. Like Hannay himself
only a few hours earlier, the milkman will not consider anything so
unusual and disturbing. The newly-charged Hannay seems to understand
this, and so he invents a persona for himself that will please the man. ‘Are
you married?’ he asks the milkman. Immediately recognizing the act that
they are performing, the milkman replies, ‘Yes, but don’t rub it in’, with
the comic timing of a music-hall act. Hannay then proceeds to spin a
yarn. He says that he is a bachelor involved with a married woman
upstairs and he is trying to escape the wrath of her husband and brother,
who are outside waiting for him. In this guise, as a man breaking the
shackles of marriage, Hannay instantly wins approval and admiration.
The milkman loves the saucy tale and breaks into a wide grin. ‘I only
wanted to be told,’ he says, handing over the uniform. The once passive
Hannay is away briskly with the first of his many assumed identities.
The montage that follows offers a fine example of the way in which
the film maintains its sense of pace and forward momentum. It lasts
only fifty seconds, yet its fourteen separate shots convey many of the
story’s key logistical points with speed, seemingly effortless efficiency,
and virtually no dialogue: the milkman’s cart is left (according to his
instructions) around the corner; shots of the train station establish that
Hannay is heading to Scotland and waiting anxiously for the train to
depart; Hannay’s pursuers arrive at the station and we see them running
but failing to catch the train; back at Hannay’s flat the cleaning woman
discovers Annabella’s body; and Hannay himself is seen sleeping on the
THE 39 STEPS 51

. Hannay disguises himself as the milkman. (Source: BFI Films:

Stills, Posters and Designs)

train. The montage is a marvel of ‘pure cinema’: clear, concise and

visual storytelling that requires no words. Two sequences within it are
particularly important. First, before the train departs, the length of
platform is shown in what initially appears to be an omniscient shot:
travellers are seen carrying bags, looking for carriages, saying goodbyes.
Then the shot is maintained as the camera pivots around to reveal that
what we have just seen was Hannay’s point of view, that Hannay was
looking at these same events while anxiously waiting for the train to
leave. The events that seemed ordinary when presented objectively
become fraught with danger when presented subjectively, and the camera
which once resisted Hannay’s perspective is now reinforcing it and
reminding us of it. Second, the climax of the montage comes when the
cleaning woman opens the door to Hannay’s flat and sees Annabella’s
dead body. She turns to the camera and opens her mouth to scream, but,
instead of hearing her scream, a high-pitched train whistle is heard on
the soundtrack, and the next shot reveals a train roaring out of a tunnel
at high speed. The links are both aural, as the scream is replaced by the
whistle, and visual, as the open mouth corresponds with the tunnel and
THE 39 STEPS 52

. The cleaning woman discovers the body. (Source: BFI Films:
Stills, Posters and Designs)

the rush of energy emerging from it. The effect is a combination of

shock, hysteria and rapid flight.
The climax of the montage is a legendary sequence, and one that has
been admired for its expressionistic use of sound and its narrative
efficiency. As Charles Barr has pointed out, however, the many commen-
taries on the sequence have overlooked one final, key ingredient of the
montage. The image of the train roaring out of the tunnel dissolves into
a close-up of Hannay asleep on the train, making the succession of
events we have just witnessed seem to be a nightmare running through
his mind. Even while Hannay sleeps, we never venture far from his
subjectivity.4 The two male voices that can be heard on the soundtrack
also seem to belong within his mind:
  : Well for one thing they are much prettier than they were
twenty years ago.
  : More free. Free and easy.
 : You’re right there. I can never understand how people used to
put up with the old-fashioned sort. All bones and no bend.
 : Well I will say for the old fashioned, they did last longer.
THE 39 STEPS 53

. The commercial travellers and an example of their wares. (Source:

Jerry Ohlinger’s Movie Material Store)

 : I don’t know. Mine last about a year. Here, I’ll show you …
[opens a case and holds up a corset]
 : [shuddering with horror] My wife!
The close-up of Hannay sleeping is held just long enough to give the
impression that these voices exist only in his dreams. Then the camera
tracks backwards and offers a wider view of the compartment, revealing
that the voices belong to two commercial travellers (as the credits define
them) sitting across from Hannay. It is only when the first man opens
his case and takes out a piece of old-fashioned lingerie, covered in belts
and straps and buckles, that it becomes apparent that they are discussing
women’s lingerie and not women generally. The light, comic innuendo
offers a similar view of marriage to that already voiced at the music hall
and by the milkman. There is also something intriguingly surreal about
the scene. The references to how long women ‘last’ and to women who
are ‘free and easy’ could easily be Hannay’s subconscious thoughts on
Annabella. The men themselves are middle aged and middle class, yet
their discussion of their own wares is schoolboyish and silly. And a
clergyman5 sits in the far corner of the compartment, pretending to read
a newspaper but eyeing the garments surreptitiously. The mixture of
THE 39 STEPS 54

repression, misogyny, lust and religion could only have been inspired by
Luis Buñuel’s surrealist masterpiece Un Chien andalou () which also
moves through a variety of moods (including horror and humour) while
tapping into the patterns and imagery of the unconscious.
At first, the commercial travellers seem hardly to notice Hannay, let
alone require some performance or invented identity from him. It is only
when the train reaches Edinburgh, and the men buy a newspaper, that
we can see how Hannay inadvertently amuses them and fits within their
personal world-view. The headlines concern the ‘Portland Place Murder’
and one of the men reads the story aloud to the other with prurient glee.
Hannay hangs on their every word, trying to discover what is known,
but the men joke about the crime and then they are distracted by a
competitor’s lingerie advertisement. It never occurs to them that the
murder is anything other than a titillating story, and they seem not to
notice Hannay’s interest in it. Then, when Hannay asks to see their
newspaper, each of the men looks directly at him, and because the camera
takes Hannay’s point of view, each seems to stare directly into the camera
and so directly at us. The effect is disturbing. This is partly because a
direct look into camera comes close to shattering the illusion of a fictional
world. It makes it seem as though we too are sitting on the train and
opposite these men. Worse, their smiles indicate that they have accepted
us into their fraternity of misogynists, that we all share in this view of
murder as entertainment, and that our cinema-going is not so different
from their newspaper reading. An equally disturbing moment comes
when Hannay holds up the newspaper to read it, and a point-of-view
shot shows the second man looking directly at him. In the foreground,
on the page of the newspaper, there is a photograph of Hannay, but in
the clothes of a Canadian rancher he looks quite unlike the Hannay we
have seen in London. Suddenly, while we are looking through his eyes
and taking his position in this scenario, we are reminded how little we
know about this man. At the same time, we can see that Hannay (in the
photograph) is smoking a pipe – something that we have yet to see him
do – and in the background and above the newspaper we can see that
the man sitting opposite is smoking too. In fact, the composition of the
shot makes it appear as though the salesman’s pipe smoke is emerging
from the pipe in the photograph of Hannay! It is an intense and unsettling
scene, and one which highlights both the desire to indentify with Hannay
and how little we know about him. Nevertheless, when Hannay steps out
of the carriage to escape from these creepy men, it is such a relief that
it re-establishes his primacy within the story.
THE 39 STEPS 55

Sympathy with Hannay is emphasized further because when he leaves

the carriage it is clear that he has decided to give himself up to the police,
and this is the first confirmation we have had of his innocence. He
approaches a policeman on the station platform purposefully. As he gets
within earshot of the policeman, though, he realizes that the policeman
is reading the very same newspaper and Hannay hears him declare,
‘There’s enough evidence there to hang any man!’ This is a scenario that
Hannay wants no part of, and he quickly gets back on the train. The
scene marks a turning point in the story. Hannay, we understand now,
is hunted by both the police and the spies, and both threaten his life. In
this ‘double pursuit’, he is truly the underdog, and identification with
him becomes stronger as a result. The scenes in the train as it moves
northwards are particularly strong in conveying his plight. Although the
train is helping him to escape, and the wide expanses of Scotland can
now be seen from its windows, it is also confining and possibly trapping
him. The sense of claustrophobia is particularly strong as he stands in
the train’s tight corridor, watching as the police gradually check every
compartment for him. They come closer and closer, and there seems to
be no possible means of escape.
It is at this point, when he is trapped and has no other alternatives,
that Hannay sees Pamela for the first time and must quickly gauge
whether she will save or betray him. She is sitting in a nearby com-
partment, and at first glance her appearance is hardly promising. She
wears a black and white dress and matching hat, the ensemble resembling
a nun’s habit. She also wears glasses and is reading the (incriminating)
newspaper. Nevertheless, he crashes into her carriage and, declaring,
‘Darling, how wonderful to see you!’, rushes over to her and kisses her
passionately. This performance pleases the police, who pass by the
compartment laughing as one says, ‘There’s a man getting a free meal
in there’. It may also be pleasurable to Pamela. As Hannay kisses her,
close-ups reveal her hands unclenching, her spinsterish glasses dropping
away from her face and her eyes closing. It seems just possible that this
wildly melodramatic scenario and this dashing romantic hero might
sweep her off her feet. Until, that is, Hannay makes the mistake of
dropping the romantic persona and telling her the truth: he is an innocent
man on the run, he needs a few days to clear his name, and so on. In
the midst of this explanation, the police come back and ask if they have
seen Hannay. ‘This is the man you want,’ Pamela says with some disgust,
thereby indicating that (in this guise at least) he is not the man she
wants.
THE 39 STEPS 56

Not for the first or last time, his cause seems lost. But when the
detective demands, ‘Is your name Hannay?’, he replies, ‘No!’ And,
indeed, he now seems nothing like the lethargic man we saw in London.
He pushes the detective out of his way, leaps out of the outer carriage
door, climbs along the outside of the train as it speeds along the bridge,
comes through the window of the next carriage and escapes down the
train’s corridor. The ensuing chase through the train is played for
comedy. In the dining car, a waiter with a tray laden with dishes is
pushed this way and that, and a car full of rabidly snarling dogs turns
the police into bumbling cowards. In the midst of this mêlée Hannay
seems to vanish. An exterior shot of the train, now stopped on the
Fourth Bridge, shows the police searching for him on the track, and a
slight camera pan reveals that he stands clinging to one of the bridge ’s
massive beams. A point-of-view shot offers his vertiginous perspective,
hundreds of feet above the water. The train’s conductor protests, ‘It’s
against all the regulations to stop on the bridge!’, and once the train
moves off again, another camera pan reveals that Hannay has somehow
left his perch and vanished again. It is unthinkable, however, that he has
fallen. His resourcefulness and speed, as well as our own belief in his
abilities, are now an established part of the story’s dramatic logic.

T H E C R O F T E R ’ S C O T TA G E

A shot of the Forth Bridge, looking majestic in the twilight, is held for
some thirty seconds as the soundtrack provides a montage of Morse
code, newspaper hawkers, radio announcements and police bulletins
relating to Hannay’s escape. While the bridge offers Hannay an escape
route, it also conveys news of his movements. At the very moment he
walks past a remote crofter’s cottage in the Scottish Highlands, a news-
paper is being delivered. There would seem to be few places he can hide,
but actually the crofter could not be less interested in the newspaper. He
never even looks at the headlines about the Portland Place murders.
Hannay introduces himself as Mr Hammond, an out-of-work mechanic
headed for Alt-na-Shellach, but the crofter’s only interest in him is that
he might stay overnight at the cottage as a paying guest. Hannay is
happy to pay him, and so the crofter is happy with him. When they come
across a young woman at the cottage door, though, Hannay makes the
mistake of asking, ‘Your daughter?’ ‘My wife!’ the crofter replies. From
this point on, the crofter is able to conceive of Hannay only in relation
to the wife who fills him with such shame and rage. John Laurie conveys
THE 39 STEPS 57

the wretched meanness of the crofter almost entirely through his eyes,
which flash with anger, narrow with suspicion or burn with jealousy.
Peggy Ashcroft, as his wife Margaret, has a gentle demeanour and air
of sad resignation, and she is the source of the most sympathetic and
sincere moments in a film that is otherwise marked by wry humour,
suspense and shocks.
Margaret longs to live a youthful and modern life in the city. Instead,
she is stuck on this farm and with this older, sanctimonious man who
declares the city to be ‘full of wickedness’ and intones that ‘God made
the country’. Little wonder, then, that when Hannay compliments her
beauty and tells her about life in London, she seems captivated by him.
But Hannay is only trying to distract her so that he can get to the
newspaper that has just been delivered, and he is interrupted when the
crofter returns and eyes them suspiciously. Each, it seems, can see only
what they want or need to see in one another. This is demonstrated in
a remarkable series of shots that are defined entirely by each character’s
point of view. The sequence begins with a medium shot of the three
characters at the table. A newspaper detailing the Portland Place murders
is placed in the foreground as all three characters close their eyes and
the crofter begins reciting a dismal prayer. ‘Sanctify these bounteous
mercies to us miserable sinners,’ he begins, but as the word ‘sinners’ is
spoken the shot changes to a close-up of Hannay. If the prayer itself
represents the crofter’s attempt to press his world-view on to the others,
this change in point of view suggests that he will not be successful; that
it is the crofter, in fact, who is both miserable and a sinner. The next
close-up is of Margaret, and she opens her eyes to look at Hannay just
as her husband says the words, ‘all thy manifold blessings’. From Mar-
garet’s point of view, Hannay is indeed a blessing: a stranger bringing
some kindness into the house. She sees that Hannay is looking down
and surreptitiously reading the newspaper and her eyes follow his to the
headlines. Just as her husband says, ‘and turn our hearts from wickedness
… ’, she realizes that Hannay is the subject of the headlines. A close-
up of Hannay from Margaret’s point of view, as the crofter continues
with ‘ … and worldly things’, shows that she has realized that Hannay
may represent all the worldliness and wicked things that her husband
has warned her about. But Hannay has followed her thoughts and so
shakes his head slightly, and mouths the words ‘It’s not me’ to her. Like
Pamela on the train, Margaret must decide very quickly about Hannay.
What makes her such a sympathetic character is not only that she decides
to trust him, but also that she does not submit to her husband’s world-
THE 39 STEPS 58

. Hannay, the crofter’s wife and the crofter, caught in the headlights
of an approaching car. (Source: BFI Films: Stills, Posters and
Designs)

view or the newspaper’s. To her peril, she rejects these views of Hannay
and trusts her own.
The last close-up of the sequence reveals that the crofter has opened
his eyes and seen them communicating. He rises from the table, saying
that he has forgotten to lock the barn, and then the camera follows him
as he goes out of the cottage and walks around to look through the
window. The camera initially stays behind him, so that when he gets to
the window, there is not a point-of-view shot but a shot of the crofter
looking through the window. His body completely obscures the camera’s
view of Hannay, and so all that we can see is the crofter (outside)
spying on his wife (inside). The effect is to suggest his single-minded
obsession with her imagined wickedness. He can see nothing else when
he looks at her except what is in his own mind. This is followed by a
point-of-view shot looking in through the window, which shows the
crofter’s view of Hannay and Margaret talking heatedly. Hannay, we
know, is quickly trying to explain himself to Margaret. But the reverse
shot, showing the crofter looking through the window, indicates that for
THE 39 STEPS 59

him the scene can mean only one thing: in his eyes, they are plotting
their adultery. The careful orchestration of the camerawork throughout
this sequence, and the importance given to looking and perspective rather
than dialogue, mark it as a perfect example of Hitchcock’s masterly
pursuit of ‘pure cinema’.
When John catches Margaret waking Hannay in the night, he almost
seems happy to have his suspicions confirmed. ‘Making love behind my
back!’ he declares victoriously, and instructs Margaret alone to ‘Get out!’
But Margaret was waking Hannay only because there is a car approaching
the cottage. Ignoring her husband, she tells Hannay to take his ‘chance
of liberty’. Just as she speaks the word ‘liberty’, the shot changes from
a medium shot of the three of them to a long shot looking through
through the vertical bars of the back of a chair. The characters appear
imprisoned by the bars and, while the shot is held, the approaching car’s
headlights shine through the window and across their faces like a search-
light on prison grounds. The crofter, of course, is imprisoned by his
own wretchedness. When Hannay convinces him that Margaret was
only trying to help him escape, not a flicker of regret crosses his face.
Instead, his mind immediately turns back to his other fixation: money.
He offers to hide Hannay from the police for a price, but then cannot
resist asking the police if there is a reward for Hannay’s capture. His
obsession with virtue can stem only from his own lack of it. Margaret,
meanwhile, is imprisoned in this cottage and marriage. She urges Hannay
to run, just as she would like to, and she gives him her husband’s dark
coat so that he won’t be seen crossing the moors. ‘He’ll not ill treat you?’
Hannay asks. ‘No, he’ll pray at me but no more,’ she assures him. He
promises never to forget her, but the cursory manner with which he
kisses her goodbye suggests that it is an empty promise. As Hannay’s
performances go, this is perhaps the least convincing. Margaret certainly
is not taken in. After he has fled into the darkness, she is seen in close-
up, hanging her head in misery as the screen slowly fades to black.

PROFESSOR JORDAN’S HOUSE

As he flees toward Alt-na-Shellach, Hannay appears to be as trapped on

the moors as Margaret is in the cottage. He is pursued by the police, by
local men and by a gyroplane which at one point appears just above
him. The score is heard again for the first time since the opening credits,
and it too lends an air of danger to the scene.
But despite the dramatic situation and the accompanying music, the
THE 39 STEPS 60

. Professor Jordan, Mrs Jordan, Hannay and the Jordans’ maid
exchange worried looks when Hannay first arrives at Alt-na-
Shellach. (Source: BFI Films: Stills, Posters and Designs)

scene rapidly diminishes into a parody. The footage is speeded-up, and

the effect suggests the comic chases of the silent era. William Rothman
suggests that this was the filmmakers’ design, and that the scene was
intended as light relief.6 Yet it also appears that the location footage,
while scenic, was not particularly dramatic. It was filmed on location in
the Glencoe area, but a double for Robert Donat was used, and Donat’s
double has to be kept at such a distance that the drama of the chase is
dissipated. The end result is curiously uneven. As Hannay and the police
move at a comically jerky pace, the score continues to suggest real danger
and drama, right up until Hannay (now recognizable as Donat again)
reaches the door of his destination, and a thunderous snare drum seems
to announce his arrival.
Hannay has travelled to Alt-na-Shellach only because it was circled on
Annabella’s map. He has no idea why she circled it or indeed anything
about its inhabitants. When he arrives, though, he is apparently over-
whelmed by its air of affluence and respectability. A polite maid answers
the door. The professor welcomes him and introduces him to his
THE 39 STEPS 61

matronly wife and two daughters. They have just attended church and
are now having a birthday party for their daughter Hilary, which is
attended by their well-to-do neighbours and even the county sheriff. And
the elegant, genial and smiling Professor Jordan bears a striking resemb-
lance to President Franklin D. Roosevelt who, in , was nearing the
peak of his power and popularity. ‘The only thing you have to fear is fear
itself,’ Roosevelt had told Americans in the depths of the depression. His
forthright delivery and cheerful confidence were convincing, but people
also wanted to believe his reassuring words. Professor Jordan has a
similarly confident and authoritative air, and Hannay does not pause for
a moment to consider that he may be deceitful. Indeed, Hannay seems
relieved at having found someone who appears to be in a position to help
him. Like the other characters in the film who see only what they want
to see, Hannay accepts Professor Jordan at first glance because it suits his
own world-view and purpose. Such a wealthy man must be a respectable
man, and such a respectable man must be able to help him clear his name.
Initially, the cinema audience may also assume that Professor Jordan
is trustworthy, but a series of clues gradually reveals that he is not.
Hitchcock defined suspense as giving the audience knowledge that the
characters do not have, and this scene offers an example of that strategy.
We see (but Hannay does not) that the seemingly demure maid lies to
the police who have pursued Hannay over the moors, telling them that
no strangers have visited the house. When Hannay is introduced to the
Jordans’ guests, the camera presents them as a sea of hands: he shakes
hands, a drink is handed to him, a cigarette is passed along a line of hands
to him, another pair of hands lights it for him, and Jordan’s daughter
Hilary gesticulates with her hands as she speaks about the murderer
loose on the moors. Yet it does not occur to Hannay to look out for the
maimed hand that Annabella warned him about. Then, once the guests
have left, Hannay sits in the drawing room on his own. He appears to
be dwarfed by its size and grandeur, and also defenceless, as though this
environment has prompted him to let his guard down. If these clues
have not alerted the cinema audience, when Professor Jordan returns to
the room, we see that he secretly locks the door behind him and asks
Hannay to tell him everything he knows about Annabella Smith. Jordan
stands facing the camera but keeps his back to Hannay, so that the
audience sees what Hannay cannot: Professor Jordan has set a trap and
Hannay falls into it. He reveals his true identity, his circumstances and
the full extent of his knowledge.
‘Did she tell you what the foreign agent looked like?’ Jordan asks, and
THE 39 STEPS 62

. Professor Jordan reveals his hand to Hannay. (Source: BFI Films:
Stills, Posters and Designs)

Hannay begins to say that Annabella did not. Then, somewhat non-
chalantly, he remembers, ‘Oh, one thing, part of his little finger was
missing,’ he says, holding up his left hand to demonstrate. ‘Are you sure
it wasn’t this one?’ Jordan says, holding up his own right hand and
revealing that the top joint on his little finger is missing. The shot is a
famous one. Professor Jordan and Hannay stand facing one another,
each holding up his hand, and so creating a mirror image. For the auteur
critics, this is the moment when Hitchcock’s ‘transfer of guilt’ is made
plain and we see the link between the wayward protagonist and the
smooth villain; although neither actually killed Annabella, they share a
responsibility for her murder. Yet it is also a moment that owes much to
Buchan. For Hannay, this is the first firm evidence that Annabella was
telling the truth. Her conspiracy theories and tales of international
espionage, he now realizes, were completely true, and this apparent pillar
of the community is actually trying to bring about its ruin. The thin line
between civilization and chaos has just dissolved before Hannay’s eyes.
Professor Jordan readily admits to Hannay that he has stolen military
secrets and is taking them out of the country, but we learn little about
THE 39 STEPS 63

his true identity. It is suggested that he is not British at all when he says,
‘Well, Mr Hannay, I’m afraid I’ve been guilty of leading you down the
garden path. Or should it be up? I never can remember’, and Hannay
replies, ‘It seems to be the wrong garden all right’. The suspicion is
compounded further when Jordan says that he is known in the area as
a ‘respectable citizen’ and that it must not become known that ‘I am not
– what shall we say – not what I seem?’ Censorship prevented any
further explanation of his nationality and his beliefs, and we are left to
wonder, too, about how long he has lived in the village, what position
he might hold there, how and why he may have befriended the sheriff,
and whether or not his wife and family are aware of his duplicitous life.
When Mrs Jordan enters the room to find her husband holding a gun on
Hannay, some clarification of the latter point might be expected. Instead,
she stays absolutely in character as the matronly hostess and, ignoring
the gun altogether, asks if ‘Mr Hammond’ is ‘staying to lunch’.
The greatest surprise of the film, however, comes when Professor
Jordan shoots Hannay. There is no doubt about it. A close-up of the gun
shows the trigger being pulled and the gun firing, and Hannay is seen
taking the bullet in the heart before he slumps over, presumably dead.
If it is not as shocking as the moment in Psycho when Marion Crane
is brutally murdered only twenty minutes into the film, it is because
Hannay’s ‘murder’ is not so grotesque and not so irretrievable. Hannay
has already been shown to be capable of extricating himself from the
tightest corners. Thus, it is more of a surprise than a shock when he is
shot, and we are only left to wonder, how can he get out of this?

THE SHERIFF’S OFFICE

The answer comes very quickly, after a brief fade-out darkens the screen
only for a second. Suddenly the crofter is asking for his hymnbook and
saying that he left it in his overcoat. Margaret, who is offscreen, answers,
‘I’m afraid I gave it to that gentleman who was staying here that night’,
at which point John walks towards her and the sound of her scream fills
the soundtrack. The assurance she gave (‘He’ll pray at me but no more’)
obviously suited Hannay’s purpose and was accepted too readily by
him. Her scream, meanwhile, merges on the soundtrack with the sound
of laughter. It is the sheriff, that symbol of patriarchal authority, laugh-
ing as Hannay shows him the crofter’s hymnbook, which stopped the
bullet from entering his body. Hannay explains to the sheriff that after
he was shot (and presumed to be dead), his body was put in a dressing
THE 39 STEPS 64

room and he escaped by stealing the professor’s car and driving into
town to alert the authorities. Hannay would have been wise, though, to
recall the words with which the professor’s daughter introduced the
sheriff to him: ‘He ’d give you six months’ hard [labour] as soon as look
at you.’ For as soon as the police arrive at the sheriff ’s office, the sheriff
exclaims that he has been ‘playing for time with a murderer!’ A whip
pan across the room to Hannay reveals his shock. ‘We ’re not so daft in
Scotland as you Londoners seem to think,’ the sheriff now sneers,
revealing his own prejudices and his preconceptions of Hannay. He
adds that Professor Jordan is his ‘best friend in the district’. Once again,
Hannay has mistakenly assumed that he can trust an authority figure
and turn his problems over to someone else.
The sheriff ’s men place one handcuff on Hannay’s wrist before the
shot changes to the exterior of the building. There, the professor’s
henchmen are waiting and watching for him, and there is the subtle
suggestion – in their looks, clothes and demeanour – that they are
foreign. Hannay comes crashing through the window and on to the
street with the handcuffs fastened to only one of his wrists and he runs
through the streets of the provincial Scottish town.7 He is chased by
both the sheriff ’s men and the professor’s henchmen and he falls into a
crowd following a Salvation Army parade. For a moment, he blends in
perfectly with the local Salvationists. He leaves the parade to run through
a side alley but, seeing the police at the other end of the alley, he goes
through a door marked ‘Assembly Hall’. There follows one of the film’s
most jarring instances of mistaken or assumed identity. Inside the hall,
Hannay is presumed to be the late speaker (‘We’ve all been waiting for
you!’) and he is rushed on to the stage.

T H E A S S E M B LY H A L L

The political meeting taking place in the assembly hall is reminiscent of

the music hall in that the audience is restless and impatient. A pompous
speaker is shouted off the stage, and when the next speaker mumbles
incoherently there are further cries of derision. If politics is merely
theatre, it appears that the politicians are incapable of satisfying the
audience. Hannay, meanwhile, has been directed to a seat and is sitting
back once again, happy to be free of his pursuers. But the seat that he
was told to take is on the stage, and soon after sitting down it becomes
apparent that the mumbling speaker was introducing him (or whomever
Hannay is meant to be). He cannot sit back and observe, then, but is
THE 39 STEPS 65

again prodded into action. This realization comes as Hannay looks to his
left and right, and in two point-of-view shots we see that those sitting
on either side of him are looking at him expectantly. The moment
captures a common nightmare. Not only must he speak in public, but he
must speak without any sort of script or preparation. Hannay rises
reluctantly, and at first – gulping, mopping his face with a handkerchief,
straightening his tie, momentarily revealing the handcuffs still dangling
from one wrist – he appears ill at ease. He tells the audience how
‘sincerely delighted and relieved I am to find myself in your presence at
this moment’. Given that his presence in the hall has enabled him to
evade his pursuers, this statement is his own private joke. He is not yet
trying to appeal to the audience, but only playing for time. As he makes
this remark, however, Pamela walks into the hall. He is not at all delighted
or relieved to see her, of course, and so it appears that the joke is on him.
As he speaks, he watches as she questions people on the sidelines about
what this fugitive is doing at the podium, and his stumbling speech
begins to lose the audience. (It is at this point that he refers to the
election candidate whom he is meant to be endorsing, a man named
McCorquodale, as ‘McCrocodile’.) Then the professor’s henchmen enter
the hall, and, as Pamela begins speaking with them, it becomes apparent
that both she and Hannay mistake them for police detectives. Hannay,
however, is never more dynamic than when he appears to be trapped,
and so he suddenly becomes the most animated and stirring of speakers.
His plan, inspired by Annabella’s method of escaping the music hall,
is to rouse the crowd to a frenzy and so create the diversion necessary
for his escape. He begins in the manner of Mr Memory, asking the
crowd what they want to talk about, but their suggestions (‘the herring
fisheries’, ‘unemployment’, ‘the idle rich’) are too mundane for his
purpose. Instead, he launches into an impassioned and rousing speech.
This may be Hannay’s best performance of all, and it is as close as the
film comes to making an overt political statement:
‘I’ve known what it is to feel lonely and helpless and to have the whole
world against me, and those are things that no man or woman ought to
feel, and I ask your candidate and all those who love their fellow men
to set themselves resolutely to make this world a happier place to live in,
a world where no nation plots against nation, where no neighbour plots
against neighbour, where there is no persecution or hunting down, where
everybody gets a square deal and a sporting chance and where people
try to help and not hinder, and a world from which suspicion and cruelty
THE 39 STEPS 66

and fear are forever banished. That’s the sort of world I want! Is that
the sort of world you want?’

These are fine sentiments, of course, and they are clearly inspired by
Annabella’s murder, Margaret’s subjugation and Professor Jordan’s
machinations. Hannay, it seems, is being transformed by his experiences.
However, we are also aware that the words are purposefully inflated and
self-serving, and so we stand at an ironic distance from the apparently
heartfelt delivery. The camerawork conspires to extend this distance.
Hannay is seen from the audience’s point of view and, as his speech
builds in a crescendo, he is framed from closer and lower angles, and then
in profile as he raises his fist for emphasis. Yet as his delivery becomes
more emphatic, and the audience responds with more enthusiasm, the
scene becomes increasingly humorous for the cinema audience. On
reflection, it is somewhat disturbing as well. An impression of the public’s
unrest and its susceptibility to smiling authority figures has been gather-
ing pace throughout the film, and here it is demonstrated in a nutshell.
There is also the sense that once the crowd has been stirred, it is difficult
to contain the unleashed energy. In fact, the audience does not act
according to Hannay’s plan at all, but instead it surges towards him,
pushing him backwards and directly into the hands of his pursuers.

ESCAPE ON THE MOORS

Pamela’s sudden reappearance at the Assembly Hall comes some fifty

minutes into a film that is eighty-six minutes long, and her only previous
appearance (twenty-five minutes earlier) was the fleeting encounter with
Hannay on the train. By this measurement, her character may not
seem particularly important. From this point onwards, however, she is
absolutely central. She not only plays a crucial part in solving the
mystery and clearing Hannay’s name, but her reappearance signals a
change in the film’s tone. While the scenes that follow continue to offer
suspense and surprises, any sense of real menace is lightened by the
verbal sparring between Hannay and Pamela. Even at a time when the
screwball comedy was fresh and new, audiences must have recognized
the inevitability of the central couple’s romance, and that the film had
taken a turn towards achieving this end. Thus, while Hannay and Pamela
are led away from the Assembly Hall by the professor’s henchmen,
whom they still believe to be detectives, the banter between them takes
precedence over any sense of danger. ‘Must I sit next to this man?’
THE 39 STEPS 67

. Hannay acts the part that Pamela has imagined for him: a cold-
blooded murderer on the moors in the middle of the night. (Source:
The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences)

Pamela says with dismay as they get into the car, and Hannay can
scarcely conceal his smirking amusement.
The shift from suspense to screwball is signalled most clearly when
the car is halted by a flock of sheep blocking the road. ‘As long as you
stay, he stays,’ one of the henchmen says as he clasps Hannay’s loose
handcuff around Pamela’s wrist and then gets out of the car to clear the
road. In the terms of music-hall jokes, then, she has become his ‘ball and
chain’, but Hannay’s immediate reaction, ‘And as long as I go, you go!’,
indicates that he will not be tied down so easily. He will drag her along,
he thinks, until he can free himself from this burden. He clamps his hand
around her mouth to prevent her screaming. He hoists her body up into
his arms to carry her across a stream, pulls her down a sharp rocky slope,
keeps pushing and pulling as they get tangled around a fence, and then
finds a hiding place for them in a cave-like rock formation behind a
waterfall. The mise-en-scène, accentuating the couple’s descent into ever
darker, wetter and wilder places, suggests that they have regressed to the
most primitive state of relations. Through it all, Pamela protests, appears
furious, and her appearance becomes increasingly bedraggled.8 In ,
THE 39 STEPS 68

this was no way to treat a leading lady, and it was certainly not the way
to treat one as elegant and refined as Madeleine Carroll. The only
genuinely hostile moment, though, comes when Hannay pretends that
he has a gun in his pocket and threatens to shoot her if she calls out to
the spies. Otherwise, much of this chase is comical and some moments,
such as when they become caught up in the fence, would seem at home
in a Laurel and Hardy film.
After a brief ellipsis, Hannay and Pamela are seen wandering along
a deserted road in the middle of the night. It is clear that she is not at
all the ‘terrorized blonde’ that some critics have preferred to see. She
complains when Hannay lifts his arm, pulling her handcuffed wrist as he
does so (‘Don’t do that!’), and she protests when he absentmindedly
whistles Mr Memory’s theme tune (‘Oh, do stop whistling!’). And when
she asks, ‘What are you doing this all for? You can’t possibly escape, not
chained to me’, his bantering reply is, ‘Keep that question for your
husband’. Hannay does try to explain his situation to her but, as ever,
his true identity and the actual events are discarded as inconceivable.
‘Still sticking to your penny novelette spy story?’ Pamela asks. Hannay
points out that her own story – that she is alone on the moors in the
middle of the night with a murderer – is hardly to her advantage. For
a moment, he demonstrates this to her by taking the role of a murderer.
Grabbing her by the collar, he threatens, ‘Listen to one bit of advice.
From now on do every single thing I tell you to do and do it quick!’
When Pamela responds by saying ‘You big bully!’, though, it is clear
that she is not frightened. Hannay’s smiling reply to her, ‘I like your
pluck’, indicates that she is right not to be afraid. Neither of them is
entirely at home in the roles they find themselves playing.

THE ARGYLL ARMS

When they stumble across an inn, Hannay conceives of their next

performance in an instant. They will be a ‘runaway couple’, on their
honeymoon and seeking privacy. Still pretending to have a gun in his
pocket, he forces Pamela to play along with this scenario. The elderly
innkeepers are themselves so dreamily romantic, though, that they
eagerly accept the performance and ignore or misinterpret all signs to
the contrary. ‘We’ve just got the one room left with the one bed in it,
but you’ll no’ be minding that!’ the landlady says with a twinkle in her
eyes. Pamela widens her eyes and shakes her head negatively, but of
course this is taken to mean that she will not mind at all. Hannay, hiding
THE 39 STEPS 69

. Pamela removes her stockings, but Hannay shows little interest.
(Source: The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences)

his handcuffed hand, has Pamela sign the register and dictates a ridicu-
lous identity for them: ‘Mr and Mrs Henry Hopkinson, the Hollyhocks,
Hammersmith.’ ‘Is he married to her, do you think?’ the husband asks
his wife once Hannay and Pamela are in their room with the door
closed. ‘I dunna ken and I dunna care. They’re so terrible in love with
each other!’ she replies.
If Hannay has found the perfect roles with which to distract and
please this couple, he has also chosen roles that will influence his relation-
ship with Pamela. As William Rothman has pointed out, it is only when
the couple pretend to be married that they lower their defences and fall
in love.9 A similar scenario was used in It Happened One Night, but
whereas that film maintained ‘the walls of Jericho’ between the two
single beds occupied by Clark Gable and Claudette Colbert, the scenario
here is far more risqué. Hannay and Pamela not only share a double bed
but are handcuffed together in it. At first, however, the romantic atmo-
sphere of the inn has no immediate effect on them. Their room has a
four-poster bed and glowing fire, but when Hannay invites Pamela to
take off her wet skirt (‘Take it off, I don’t mind’), he seems genuinely
THE 39 STEPS 70

disinterested. Even the famously sexy moment when Pamela removes

her stockings is devoid of any sort of desire as far as Hannay and
Pamela are concerned. It is the camera that takes such a strong interest:
Hannay and Pamela are framed from the waist down as they sit before
the fire, and the shot is held as Hannay’s handcuffed hand trails along
Pamela’s leg as she removes the first stocking. Then his hand rests on
her bare knee as she unbuckles the other stocking, but just as she is
about to remove the second one, she switches hands and places a sand-
wich in Hannay’s hand (‘Here, hold this’). Hannay himself is curiously
immune and his hand is limp. It is the second time we have seen him
prepare to spend the night with a woman, and he shows no more interest
in Pamela than he did in Annabella. When they approach the bed, and
he says, ‘Will you kindly place yourself on the operating table?’, he
seems to be taunting her in the manner of a schoolboy.
Pamela assumes that somehow he is going to enjoy or take advantage
of this situation, but he corrects her. ‘Do you think I’m looking forward
to waking up in the morning and seeing your face beside me, unwashed
and shiny. What a sight you’ll be!’ he says, revealing that his conception
of marriage is not far from that of the commercial travellers, the milkman
and the music hall. It is only when she asks about his dreams (‘I’ve
always been told murderers have bad dreams’) that the coming rap-
prochement becomes apparent. As they lie on the bed together, Hannay
spins a wild yarn for her about his uncle, ‘the Cornish Bluebeard’, who
murdered all of his wives and threw his mother-in-law into the sea. It
is a gruesome story, but Hannay tells it with whimsy and suggests that
she might one day be telling this to her grandchildren. She is so amused
that she almost allows Hannay to see her laughing at his jokes. And, as
they sit up in the bed, eating sandwiches, joking and bickering as they
yawn and prepare to sleep, they could easily be taken for a married
couple. Only the fact that Hannay is still trying to free his hand from
the cuffs detracts from the impression of marital contentment.
The scene fades out as a candle on the bedside table burns down and,
when the next scene slowly fades in, the logic is very clear. We are away
from Hannay only so long as he sleeps (or is unconscious) and only to
witness events that are concurrent and crucial to the story.10 In this case,
it is Professor Jordan saying goodbye to his wife as he ‘clears out of the
country’. Whereas our previous view of this couple seemed to indicate
that the wife was powerless, robotic and unfeeling, this scene is curiously
tender and affectionate. Also, it is revealed that the wife knows of
Jordan’s espionage activities, making their relationship seem more sub-
THE 39 STEPS 71

. Hannay and Pamela as ‘honeymooners’ manacled together by

handcuffs. (Source: Jerry Ohlinger’s Movie Material Store)

stantial and supportive. If this second view of their marriage suggests

that relationships are more complex than first impressions might reveal,
that sense is furthered by the scene that follows. After another shot of
the bedside candle, Pamela is seen waking up, wriggling out of the
handcuffs, and then getting dressed and preparing to escape from the
inn. She discovers that Hannay’s ‘gun’ is only a small pipe, a revelation
which seems to irritate her. Having considered Hannay to be mad,
dangerous and sexually threatening, she is disappointed to learn that he
is a quiet gentleman with a pipe. While dressing and preparing to leave,
she hears voices downstairs and on investigation discovers that they
belong to the men they mistook for detectives. From the top of the
stairs, she spies on the men and learns from their conversation that
Hannay was telling the truth all along. Finally, just as the detectives ask
the innkeeper if there is a young couple staying at the inn, the innkeeper’s
wife comes running in. Making a great show of her anger and im-
patience, she berates her husband for serving drinks after hours and
orders the men out of the bar. Once the men have left, though, her
performance ends and she tenderly kisses her husband and says, ‘You
THE 39 STEPS 72

wouldn’t give away a young couple, would you?’ Again, the outsider’s
view of marriage has been turned on its head, and a warmer and more
intimate alternative suggested.
Pamela, still standing at the top of the stairs and spying on this
private moment, beams at them, and when she returns to the room, she
looks upon Hannay with adoration and tenderly places a blanket on
him. On the soundtrack, strings swirl romantically, and for a moment it
seems as if the film is going to descend into mush. But Pamela shivers
in the cold when she lies down on the sofa and she cannot resist taking
back the blanket she gave to Hannay. Similarly, when Hannay wakes in
the morning the scene is initially romantic. He sees the empty handcuff
dangling from his wrist and, assuming that Pamela has fled, he smiles at
her ‘pluck’. But then she sits up on the sofa and we see, through his eyes
(and a point-of-view shot) her radiant beauty. It is a direct contradiction
of the disparaging assumption he made the night before (‘What a sight
you’ll be!’). His admiration is only heightened as she reveals what she
discovered the night before: that Hannay is innocent, that Professor
Jordan is on the move, and that something important is taking place at
the London Palladium. But then he realizes that all of this happened
many hours earlier, and that Pamela has let him sleep on through the
night. ‘My good girl, I’m accused of murder! Can’t you realize the only
way I can clear myself is to expose those spies?!’ That puts an end to
the tenderly romantic mood and also to any idea that Hannay’s primary
goal was to save his country.

THE LONDON PALLADIUM

We never know how Hannay and Pamela travel back to London, or,
after the argument in the last scene, whether they actually make the
journey together. The next scene simply begins with establishing shots
of London and Scotland Yard. Pamela, now voluntarily helping Hannay,
attempts to alert the authorities to the spies’ activities. Two inspectors
reveal that while the Air Ministry does have ‘a new thing a lot of people
are interested in’, the ‘minutest inquiries’ indicate that no secret docu-
ments are missing. They are completely satisfied with this explanation
and only want to know where Hannay is hiding. One of the detectives
begins to insist that Pamela must reveal Hannay’s whereabouts, but the
other stops him, bids her a cordial farewell, and allows her to leave.
Once she is out the door, however, the one who feigned such civility
says, ‘She’ll lead us to Richard Hannay’, and he has her followed. Like
THE 39 STEPS 73

the sheriff before him, this detective is just as capable of duplicity as

anyone else in the film.
The Palladium is a much more upmarket theatre than the music hall
where the film began. Its audience is well dressed and there are no signs
of drinking, smoking or unruliness. Thus, we might expect this crowd to
be more restrained and refined than audiences at both the music hall and
the political meeting. Yet the scene quickly demonstrates that even the
best-dressed audience has a predilection for violence. In the stage show
(Crazy Month), a man in formal dress stands alone in the middle of the
stage singing a refined love song (‘Love is a flower that blooms’) until two
men dressed as tramps rush on to the stage and push him over. The
audience almost explodes with laughter at this challenge to authority,
class, decorum and order. Meanwhile, the shots inside the Palladium are
intercut with shots of the police encircling the building, the audience, and
even the orchestra pit and backstage area. The effect is to suggest that the
entertainment itself is causing disorder, that the audience is on the brink
of erupting, and that the police are here as the agents of repression.
From his seat in the stalls, Hannay spots Professor Jordan in a boxed
seat, but then Pamela arrives and tells him that according to the Air
Ministry there are no documents missing. She says, ‘so there’s an end to
it’ just as the stage act ends and its music comes to a halt. Once again,
the line is being blurred between the stage show and reality. However,
the first time the line was blurred was in the East End music hall where
Hannay became caught up this nightmare. Now, the opportunity to end
the nightmare has arisen. As soon as the music from the last act ends,
the music for the next act begins and it is Mr Memory’s theme song.
Hannay has been whistling this tune ever since he met Pamela. He makes
the connection instantly in his mind and it is demonstrated for us with
point-of-view shots through the opera glasses. First, he looks at Mr
Memory as he is introduced and his powers of memory are stated. Then,
he looks up to Professor Jordan, who is looking at his watch and is
apparently waiting impatiently for Mr Memory. ‘Of course there are no
papers missing,’ he tells Pamela, ‘all the information is inside Memory’s
head!’ By this time, the police have spotted Hannay, and they do not
want the show to spill out from the stage again, as it did at the music
hall. They ask him to come along quietly, not to ‘spoil people’s entertain-
ment’ by making a scene.
Hannay, however, insists on spoiling people’s entertainment or, at the
very least, transforming their entertainment into something altogether
more real and disturbing. It is the only way that he can save himself.
THE 39 STEPS 74

. Mr Memory pauses as Hannay asks him, ‘What are the thirty-nine
steps?’ (Source: BFI Films: Stills, Posters and Designs)

As the audience asks Mr Memory questions (appropriately, given his

impending death, they are morbid questions: ‘When did Florence
Nightingale die?’, ‘What was the date of General Gordon’s death?’),
Hannay turns to face the stage and yells out, ‘What are the thirty-nine
steps!?’ Mr Memory is seen in a close-up, but the framing is skewed,
suggesting his confusion and disorientation at being asked this question.
The skewed framing is held as Hannay asks again, and held still as Mr
Memory slowly begins his answer: ‘The thirty-nine steps is an organ-
ization of spies collecting information on behalf of the Foreign Office
of …’ This is as close as we ever come to knowing the nationality of the
spies. A shot rings out, halting Mr Memory’s revelations, and creating
hysteria in the audience. In a film that is testing the limits of censorship
and power of implication, this is a telling development. Just as Mr
Memory is about to say the unsayable, he is shot and dragged off the
stage and out of public view before he can say any more. That it is
Professor Jordan who shot him might even suggest that censorship is in
league with undemocratic forces. When Jordan leaps on to the stage
himself, the police converge upon him and the curtain closes, making this
appear to be a perfectly choreographed part of the stage show.
THE 39 STEPS 75

The Palladium audience, however, has had its entertainment spoiled.

They are on their feet and screaming, and the panic surpasses the hysteria
of the music hall. The master of ceremonies cries out unconvincingly,
‘Ladies and gentleman, there is no need for alarm, no cause for alarm.
Take your seats! Take your seats, please!’ Then he has the idea of
bringing the dancing girls out on to the stage. And as soon as the
orchestra strikes up a jaunty dance tune, and the girls begin twirling and
kicking, the hysteria dies down. The escapist entertainment has begun
again, and it has the desired palliative effect. Remarkably, even when
one of the performers is murdered on stage, and the murderer ap-
prehended before the audience’s very eyes, the show must go on. This
is entirely within the logic of the film. Every crisis has been met with
denials, disbelief and the pretence that there is nothing wrong, and
every pretence has been preferred to the truth.
The film’s final shot is a lengthy and elaborately constructed one. Mr
Memory has collapsed backstage and a crowd, including Hannay and
Pamela, has gathered around him. Mr Memory is in the centre of the
frame as he reveals the secrets that have been at the core of the story.
He is clearly meant to be the focus of our attention, but in the back-
ground, over his shoulder, the dancing girls can be seen on the stage,
doing their routine as the music continues to play. While Mr Memory
recites the formula for a silent plane engine, then, we can also watch as
the dancers kick their legs in unison. It is as though the cinema audience
is being challenged here. Are we as empty-headed as the Palladium
audience? Can we be trusted to take Mr Memory’s revelations seriously?
Will we pay attention to anything other than light entertainment that is
meant to pacify and distract us? The film cannot answer, of course, and
given that Hannay has been our own surrogate adventurer, it cannot
answer on his behalf either. The camera dollies back, staying behind
Hannay and Pamela and at waist level. We cannot see their faces or what
they are looking as they stand facing both Mr Memory and the stage. All
that the film can show us now is what we have been expecting ever since
Hannay and Pamela began to banter, the coming together of the couple.
This is done in a manner fitting with the previous resistance to
sentiment and strings. We do not see a kiss, a clinch shot or even see
their faces. All we can see, in fact, is their hands. Hannay’s hand, with
the handcuff still dangling from his wrist, reaches out tentatively to take
Pamela’s gloved hand into his own. The suggestiveness of this gesture
indicates that he has regained his potency, not only in the sexual sense
but in the sense that he has overcome his detachment and complacency.
THE 39 STEPS 76

. Backstage at the Palladium, Mr Memory reveals all that he knows to

Hannay. (Source: BFI Films: Stills, Posters and Designs)

When Pamela accepts his hand, it is the first affectionate and reciprocated
gesture that we have seen pass between them. The handcuffs remind us
that the couple that was once manacled together is now choosing to
come together, while the black velvet of the glove suggests the warmth
and pleasure to be found in this union. It seems as though they have
found their own pleasurable terms on which they can conduct their
relationship, and that they will not be bound by the various models that
Hannay has witnessed on his journey to this point. Finally, the odd
position that the camera has taken (behind them) indicates that they
cannot be witnessed by anyone else within the world of the film. In a
film so preoccupied with performance and duplicity, this signals that it
is a truly genuine gesture and a private moment. It is an appropriate
moment, then, for the show to end and for the screen to fade to black.

THE END

This wonderfully unconventional ending – showing the couple from

behind and merely holding hands rather than kissing – was intended to
THE 39 STEPS 77

be followed by another, much more conventional final scene. It would

take place in a taxi as Hannay and Pamela leave the theatre, and Hannay
would deliver the clunking line, ‘I’ll say this for the English police,
when they find they have made a mistake they apologize.’ Hannay would
also tell Pamela that they are actually married because, according to
Scottish law, registering as man and wife at the inn was a public declara-
tion of marriage. When Pamela asks, ‘Well, what are we going to do?’,
Hannay would reply, ‘I know what I’m going to do!’, and then the film
would end as he kisses her.11 With its polite nod to the police and its
insistence that the couple were married when they spent the night to-
gether, the scene can only have been designed to placate the censors. It
was apparently filmed but thankfully not used.
Even this more conventional, less ambiguous ending would have left
some questions unanswered. We would still be left to wonder whether
Mr Memory died, about Professor Jordan’s nationality, and about what
happened to his mysterious wife, his thuggish henchmen, and the house-
maid who lied so casually to the police. Besides these incidental and
ambiguous points, the sense that something has been solved and put
right in the ending is actually quite fleeting. Indeed, if the purpose of
the final scene is to convey the restoration of order and a return to
normality, this particular ending can only be taken as highly ironic. Far
from restoring order, the ending actually opens up a number of alarming
scenarios: military secrets are being stolen by a hostile foreign power, a
new war cannot be far away, it will be fought with new weapons, and
aerial warfare will involve silent engines and surprise air attacks. The
implications of Mr Memory’s revelations are quite startling for the last
few minutes of a film, particularly in the context of the s.
Some critics, of course, would immediately identify these concerns
as the ‘MacGuffin’ of the plot, the secrets that drive the story forwards
but are of little dramatic importance. According to this view, Hitchcock
is apolitical and concerned only with the personal. In one sense, these
critics are correct. As Mr Memory recites the secret formula of the silent
air engine, it is difficult not to be distracted by the line of dancing girls
and the music in the background, and so these details really cannot be
the focus of the film. However, it is the act of being distracted that is
at issue here. Throughout the film, we have seen characters ignore or
dismiss anything that is disturbing, real, difficult and complicated in
favour of the distracting, the amusing, the simple and the predictable.
The political implications of this are signalled in Hannay’s speech and
the audience’s reaction to it, as well as in the ease with which Professor
THE 39 STEPS 78

. In a taxi leaving the Palladium, Hannay tells Pamela that they
already are married. The scene was cut from the film before it was
released. (Source: BFI Films: Stills, Posters and Designs)

Jordan has gained the acceptance and respect of his community. In an

era of demagoguery, political extremism and unrest, these scenarios
seem pointedly topical and relevant. Our own culpability as the cinema
audience, meanwhile, lies not only in the fact that we prefer watching
the dancing girls, but also in our readiness to become so closely aligned
and involved with Hannay himself. He may do the right thing in the
end, but for much of the film we are shown that he is an empty vessel.
Our own desire for charm, charisma, action and easy solutions is brought
out in this ‘penny novelette spy story’ and its dashing hero. Hannay
might just as easily have turned out to be Professor Jordan, or the
Portland Place murderer, or anything else beneath his veneer of hand-
some civility.
Rather than seeing the MacGuffin as the belittlement of the story’s
political concerns, it might be seen (in this case at least) as enhancing
the story’s political concerns. Far more is revealed in the midst of the
chase than could be said in terms convincing and dramatic enough for
people to listen. Speeches are not only subject to censorship; they are
THE 39 STEPS 79

also dull. Furthermore, few in the audience would need to have the
foreign implications of the story spelt out for them. Whether they had
read Buchan’s novel, read a newspaper or even seen a newsreel before
the film began, it would have been obvious to them. Whether audiences
would have recognized the film’s portrait of Britain as a complacent and
potentially unstable and volatile country is a more intriguing point. Upon
leaving the cinema in , did anyone comment on the public disorder
they had seen on screen? Or on the link that the film suggests between
politics and theatre? Or even on the henchman’s Hitler-style moustache?
It is impossible to say. Contemporary critics certainly did not interpret
the film as having any particular relevance, but then (as we shall see)
critics of the s were not likely to look for meaning in a mere thriller.
 THREE
Post-Production

In  the British Film Institute conducted a poll of filmmakers, critics

and scholars to find the  best British films of the twentieth century.
The  Steps came in fourth on the list, which is all the more remarkable
given that the list was somewhat biased towards contemporary favourites
such as Trainspotting (), Four Weddings and a Funeral (), The
Full Monty () and Shakespeare in Love (). The  Steps was, in
fact, one of only three films made before  to be placed on the list,
and it was placed far higher than the other two (The Lady Vanishes and
Goodbye Mr Chips at numbers  and  respectively).1 This, in effect,
meant that The  Steps was considered the best British film of the
s, and indeed the best British film made before the Second World
War. But this is only one of many accolades that The  Steps has
enjoyed (or suffered, depending on your point of view) in the decades
since its original release. Through the years, its reputation has been
particularly bound up with that of its director, and that alone has led
The  Steps to be understood as a Catholic film, a misogynist film, an
apolitical film, a great box-office success in the United States, and the
archetypal Hitchcock film. If we go back to the s, however, it
becomes evident that it was considered in very different ways. In the
first few years after its release, it was heralded as an Alfred Hitchcock
film in some quarters, but in others it was seen as Buchan’s film, as a
vehicle for its stars, as a screwball comedy, and even as the film that
inspired a ‘thirty-nine steps club’ in New York City.

PREMIÈRE AND PUBLICITY

The film’s British première was very much centred on John Buchan.
The high-profile event was held on  June  at the New Gallery
Theatre in Regent Street, London, and it was attended by a number of
prominent figures, including ‘many social notabilities and film celebrities’
P O S T- P R O D U C T I O N 81

. The film’s poster. Note that Hitchcock’s name is at the bottom and
in the smallest letters, and Buchan’s name does not appear at all.
(Source: Jerry Ohlinger’s Movie Material Store)
THE 39 STEPS 82

as well as an unusual number of political dignitaries.2 Some were

government officials whose posts seem directly relevant to the film’s
contemporary concerns: the Home Secretary (Sir John Simon), and both
the current Minister for Air (Sir Philip Cunliffe-Lister) and his
predecessor (Lord Londonderry). If these officials had a view on the
film’s timely theme, they did not reveal it. In fact, they were there
primarily because of their friendship with John Buchan. Gaumont-
British was making the most of the film’s connection with Buchan. He
was now Lord Tweedsmuir and also the newly appointed (and soon to
depart) Governor-General of Canada. This gave the film a pedigree far
above that of any ordinary release. A dinner was held that evening at
the Piccadilly Hotel, adding to the sense of occasion, and in the speeches
afterwards Buchan took the opportunity to make a pronouncement on
the film. His exact comments were not reported, but he apparently
congratulated Hitchcock and said that the film had improved upon the
novel. Privately, his opinion may have been a little less enthusiastic.
Buchan’s son William recalled that his father ‘minded much less than
most of his readers the liberties which Hitchcock was obliged to take
with The Thirty-Nine Steps’, even though his mother ‘could never be got
to understand why the book could not have been filmed exactly as it had
been written’.3 Hitchcock, meanwhile, reportedly slept through the
première and did not speak at the dinner. He ‘played the part of the
Buddha of British Films’ that evening, according to one report, and ‘let
his work speak for itself ’.4
It was Buchan who made the première a newsworthy event, and his
political and social status may have established the film as respectable in
the eyes of a more reserved breed of cinema-goer. He was not con-
sidered a selling point for the general public, though, and in fact the
publicity materials for the film did not emphasize Buchan at all. Instead,
the publicity emphasizes the stars’ names and the romantic dimension of
the film. The film’s poster, for example, does not even feature Buchan’s
name; it is dominated by the names of Robert Donat and Madeleine
Carroll, the title itself, and in particular by a large drawing that shows
the couple in a tenderly romantic pose. The drawing is actually more
tender and romantic than anything seen in the film, and it appears to
have been used as a means of signalling to the public that the film was
not a direct adaptation of the novel. It was perceived wisdom at the time
that women visited the cinema more often than men, and that when a
man and a woman went to the cinema together it was the woman who
chose which film to see.5 Hence, the poster had to make it plain that The
P O S T- P R O D U C T I O N 83

 Steps was not a First World War story, it was not a Boy’s Own
adventure story and it certainly was not an exclusively male story. It had
become a romance, and, as the dominant image indicates, it had become
a romance involving two of Britain’s most glamorous and attractive
stars. Only the smaller image in the lower left-hand corner of the poster,
which shows Donat’s hand pressed over Carroll’s mouth and their wrists
handcuffed together, gives any indication that the film is a thriller. Yet
even this image can be seen to present Donat as Carroll’s protector
rather than her abductor.
The other publicity materials created by Gaumont-British include a
‘pressbook’ that offers ready-made articles about the film. These were
written by the studio’s publicity department in order to supply news-
papers and fan magazines with ready-made copy about the film. The
articles cover a wide array of topics, but the greatest emphasis once
again is placed on the stars, their background, and their experiences
during the making of the film. Much attention is paid, for example, to
Madeleine Carroll’s personal background and social status, and to the
rough treatment that she received while handcuffed to Donat. In a
biographical sketch, it is said that before becoming an actress Carroll
was ‘a schoolteacher who wanted to be a nun’. Her marriage to Captain
Philip Astley, we learn, took place at their ‘charming villa on the shores
of Lake Como’. Astley is said to be a ‘personal friend of the Prince of
Wales’ and a member of the family that donated one of its estates,
‘Chequers’, for use as the prime minister’s country retreat. Carroll is
said to ‘take a keen interest in her husband’s estate’ in Kent, and to make
‘delicious preserves’ from the fruit grown in the estate’s orchards. In
short, Carroll is presented as a rather grand country lady, which makes
it all the more compelling to read on and discover how dreadfully she
was treated on the set. Her ‘golden hair and beautiful clothes’ were
ruined by the rain and mist in the scenes set on the Scottish moors. Her
‘slim wrists’ were bruised by the handcuffs she had to wear. And,
although we are assured that she and Robert Donat eventually became
friends, it is said that their relationship got off to a rocky start. Donat
played a practical joke in which he would pretend to forget that he and
Carroll were bound together by handcuffs. He would suddenly wave
energetically to someone across the set, and ‘as a result Madeleine would
be practically swung out of her seat and thrown over his head’. Little
wonder, then, that Carroll ‘found life strenuous and complicated beyond
understanding when she was making this picture’.6
When taken out of context, this may seem an extremely odd manner
THE 39 STEPS 84

of promoting a film. Neither the ladylike character of the actress nor the
ungentlemanly treatment she received on the set would appear to be
obvious selling angles. Until, that is, one realizes that the pressbook’s
stories represent an alternative version of events which occur in the film:
Pamela’s hair and clothes are ruined, the handcuffs hurt her wrists, and
Hannay absentmindedly waves his arms and causes Pamela to stumble
and wince. Thus the publicity offers a taste of the film’s tone and
highlights its screwball elements. Indeed, the press articles themselves
have all the elements of a screwball comedy: an upper-class, socially
prominent and outspoken woman bickers and battles with a less wealthy
but equally stubborn man,7 they make fools of themselves while pre-
tending to hate one another, and they finally reconcile in the ending.
One of the pressbook articles even declares the film to be ‘the British It
Happened One Night’. The film’s own catchphrases, which were to be
used on lobby cards and in newspaper advertisements, also stress this
dimension of the film:
Fated to be mated with the one man she hated!
The most charming brute who ever scorned a lady!
How much hating does it take to fall in love? She loathed him, he
despised her, and so they were married!
She hated to be mastered. But she learned to like it from the MAN who
put the MAN in roMANce.
A girl’s eye view of a caveman lover.

Given that Carroll’s role in the film is mainly limited to its final thirty
minutes, it seems remarkable that all of these catchphrases draw attention
to her character, and that the film is pitched so heavily towards a female
audience. ‘A girl’s eye view of a caveman lover’, for example, indicates
that the film offers a female perspective on the story.8
The publicity materials also signal the change in Madeleine Carroll’s
screen persona. Carroll had previously played mainly in costume dramas,
and her characters tended to be feminine in the most traditional and
dutiful fashion: she played a nurse in I was a Spy (), a southern belle
in The World Moves On () and a queen in The Dictator ().
Furthermore, Hitchcock’s verdict on her performance in these films –
‘cold, unfeeling, humourless’ – is a fair one. Rachael Low makes a
similar point in her discussion of I was a Spy: ‘The heroine was played
by Madeleine Carroll, back from Hollywood and groomed to bitter
P O S T- P R O D U C T I O N 85

elegance whatever the age, date or condition of the character she was
playing; although beautiful, she seemed cold.’9
The  Steps allowed Carroll to break free of both the costume drama
and the air of ‘bitter elegance ’ that engulfed her characters. The articles
in the pressbook were meant to signal that this film was not so stately
and stuffy as her previous films, and that she had a truly modern role
in a contemporary film. This proved to be a successful change of image
for Carroll, and one that would make her a major star over the next few
years. Nevertheless, the idea that Carroll was Hitchcock’s archetypal
terrorized blonde has entered the mythology that has surrounded the
director and his films since the s. From this perspective, the stories
in the pressbook seem sinister rather than screwball, and by extension
the sight of Carroll being dragged over the moors is deemed to be an
early warning of the horrors to come.10 Yet rather than seeing Carroll
as the first in a line of blonde actresses that includes Janet Leigh in
Psycho and Tippi Hedren in The Birds, it seems more appropriate to see
her as Britain’s first screwball heroine, in a line that crosses over to
Hollywood and connects with actresses as formidable (and unterrorized)
as Claudette Colbert, Irene Dunne, Katharine Hepburn and Myrna Loy.

C O M M E R C I A L R E C E P T I O N I N B R I TA I N

Gaumont-British was confident that The  Steps would be a great box-

office success in Britain. Michael Balcon, eager to raise the profile of
Gaumont-British as a production company, urged that the company’s
name should be featured prominently in the advertising, on the grounds
that ‘it may be a long time before we have another chance like this’.11 In
the week of the film’s release, four consecutive pages of advertisements
were taken out in the British trade paper Kinematograph Weekly.12 One
page was usual for a new film, two indicated an important release, but
a four-page spread signalled a cinematic event. Perhaps most tellingly,
The  Steps was booked to run at the New Gallery Theatre for a full
five weeks. The New Gallery had , seats, and films tended to spend
no more than two or three weeks in such a large venue, but even the
five-week engagement proved to be an underestimation of the film’s
popularity. Fuelled by enthusiastic reviews, The  Steps was still going
strong at the end of its fifth week. The New Gallery had another
booking and so The  Steps moved to the similarly capacious Marble
Arch Pavilion, where it lasted no fewer than eight weeks. It then went
on to the Dominion Theatre for a week, and finally to the Haymarket
THE 39 STEPS 86

Theatre for a further two weeks. By that time, it had spent sixteen weeks
in some of the West End’s largest venues, a record surpassed that year
only by the Hollywood epic Lives of a Bengal Lancer ().13
At the time, it was usual for important releases to be shown first in
London’s West End, and have an exclusive run at advanced admission
prices, before being released anywhere else. Hence, The  Steps did not
play anywhere apart from the West End until the autumn of  when
it began to make its way around Britain. It then followed the standard
release pattern of playing first in major cities and in regional capitals
such as Birmingham, Edinburgh, Glasgow and Cardiff, and then moving
on to smaller cities, provincial towns and local theatres. In the days
before television or radio advertising, the local cinema managers used a
variety of stunts to draw attention to the film. In Barnsley, photographs
of the stars were given away outside the theatre. In Weymouth there
was a ‘count your steps’ competition outside the cinema. In Penge, circus
animals with banners announcing the film’s arrival were paraded down
the high street. In High Wycombe, a man dressed as a sea scout and
another dressed in ‘crazy evening dress’ walked through the streets
carrying a ladder with thirty-nine steps. In Broadstairs, meanwhile, the
film’s links with the local steps climbed by John Buchan in  were
publicized.14 It is impossible to determine whether any of these stunts
and strategies helped the film to gain a wider audience. Box-office reports
were not made public in Britain, and if the company’s own internal
reports have survived, they have yet to surface. However, recent research
by John Sedgwick, based on exhibition records from around the country,
suggests that The  Steps was as popular in the provinces as it was in
London, and that throughout the country it ranked among the top ten
most popular films of .15

COMMERCIAL RECEPTION ABROAD

To a significant extent, the commercial success of The  Steps in Britain

had been a foregone conclusion. The novel was a much loved classic.
Hitchcock was the country’s best known director. Robert Donat and
Madeleine Carroll ranked high among British stars. The combination of
all of these factors was overwhelmingly favourable. Outside Britain,
however, none of these factors was quite so strong and selling the film
to foreign audiences posed far greater challenges. It is telling, for ex-
ample, that the greatest foreign success was achieved in Canada, where
the release was timed to coincide with the arrival of the new Governor-
P O S T- P R O D U C T I O N 87

General, John Buchan, in November . By January , The 

Steps had achieved the highest earnings ever for a British film in Canada,
and Robert Donat was said to be the country’s most popular film star.16
Although some encouraging reports also came from Australia, it is
apparent that Buchan’s name gave the film a selling point in Canada that
it lacked elsewhere.17
Gaumont-British, as we have seen, was particularly intent on market-
ing the film in the United States, but this was to be a challenge. Alfred
Hitchcock was not a well-known director at this point. The Man Who
Knew Too Much had been released in the USA six months earlier, but the
release had not been particularly wide or successful.18 Some American
exhibitors complained that the title of The  Steps was too obscure,
which suggests that John Buchan’s novel was not as well known in the
USA as it was in Britain. Robert Donat and Madeleine Carroll may
have been better known in America than most other British actors in
, but neither had reached that level of stardom in which their names
alone would draw crowds. And, perhaps most troubling, British films
had a poor reputation in the United States at this time. One American
film industry executive had recently informed British producers that in
recent years American exhibitors had been ‘about as eager to handle a
British film as they were to touch a leper’.19
Despite all these limitations, The  Steps was released in the ‘first
run’ sector of the American cinema market. This consisted of the huge
theatres that dominated the main streets of every major American city
in the era before suburban sprawl. These plush movie palaces had seating
capacities in the thousands. They showed only the most recent and most
popular releases, and because they received the exclusive rights to show
films first and without local competition, they were able to charge the
highest ticket prices for admission. The films would later move on to
second- and third-run cinemas, but these were networks of progressively
smaller, cheaper and usually more remote venues, and they offered a
lesser financial return to the distributor. The lion’s share of box-office
earnings was in the first-run market, and Gaumont-British’s ambitious
production policies hinged on success in this arena. The  Steps thus
entered into competition with Hollywood’s top releases, films that were
marketed on the basis of instantly recognizable star names matched with
familiar stories. In the late summer and the autumn of , for example,
it was playing throughout the United States alongside Fred Astaire and
Ginger Rogers in Top Hat, Will Rogers in Steamboat ’Round the Bend,
Greta Garbo in Anna Karenina, Shirley Temple in Curly Top and many
THE 39 STEPS 88

other films that audiences would have seen as a safe and familiar bet for
an evening’s entertainment.
For Americans, The  Steps clearly was not such a familiar combina-
tion of elements. Nevertheless, the film’s very first booking (in August
) was at Boston’s Keith Memorial Theatre, a venue with , seats,
and over the next two months similarly-sized venues were booked in the
largest cities across the country. The climax of this campaign was a
mid-September engagement at New York’s Roxy Theatre, which had
nearly , seats and rivalled Radio City Music Hall as one of the
largest cinema halls in the city. Such theatres would show the film several
times each day for at least one week, meaning that ten of thousands of
patrons were expected to attend, and the engagement could be extended
for extra weeks if the crowds kept coming. How could an unknown
British film hope to compete on such a scale? In each city, it was up to
the local cinema to promote the film using the promotional materials
and advice that Gaumont-British provided, and clearly some would do
better than others at this task. Routine marketing gimmicks included
running trivia contests about Robert Donat in local newspapers, and
using Madeleine Carroll’s picture in beauty shops to promote both the
film and the shops’ services. A more unusual approach began on the
sidewalks of Boston: huge footprints were stencilled on to the pavement
with whitewash, and within each footprint some information about the
film was written. The thirty-nine footprints led, of course, to the Keith
Memorial Theatre’s front doors. This was considered to be a successful
promotional device, and it was copied across the country.
Regardless of the gimmicks, it proved to be good reviews and particu-
larly good ‘word of mouth’ reports that attracted audiences. In Boston
the film received both, and, according to Variety, the $, it earned
during its seven-day engagement was ‘OK’ by the standards of the
Keith Memorial Theatre. It was not held over for a second week, though,
and it clearly was not Boston’s film of choice even in that one week. At
a rival theatre, Shirley Temple and Curly Top managed to earn $,.20
Still, for an opening engagement and at a time when the national press
had yet to review the film, this was not a bad start.
The New York City engagement took place as very favourable re-
views appeared in the national and local press. This was the city more
interested in critical opinion than any other, and it was in New York that
The  Steps found its greatest and most sustained success. A total of
, people saw the film during its first week at the Roxy Theatre,
and after it had been held over for a second (and final) week, the box-
P O S T- P R O D U C T I O N 89

office takings had reached $,.21 This proved to be the film’s best
showing, however, and outside New York The  Steps had a very mixed
reception. The weekly box-office reports in Variety indicate that the film
had some success in Brooklyn, Buffalo, Chicago, Kansas City, Newark,
St Louis and Washington DC, but it was not held over for a second week
in any of these cities. Elsewhere, it did not draw the expected crowds
during the first week. In Cincinatti, business was so slow that the film
had to be replaced on the fifth day of its run. This proved to be the only
disastrous engagement, but ‘disappointing’, ‘modest’ and ‘slow’ box-
office reports came from Denver, Detroit, Indianapolis, Los Angeles,
New Haven, Oklahoma City, Philadelphia and Providence.22
There is some evidence to suggest that, given time and good word of
mouth, The  Steps could eventually garner a substantial following. In
Minneapolis, for example, it was not booked into one of the city’s largest
cinemas but instead played at the -seat World Theatre. The result
indicates that this was advantageous: with fewer seats to fill, the film was
able to enjoy a far longer engagement and develop a reputation in the
city. ‘The customers have been raving about it,’ the manager reported
in the third week, ‘and as a result [business] has held to a steady pace.’
At the end of the four-week run, the box-office gross had reached
$,, a figure far higher than those achieved in comparable cities where
the film played a single week in a large venue.23 The film also had an
exceptionally long life in New York City. It was placed second in the
New York critics’ poll of the best films of .24 In December  the
New York Times published a profile of the director (‘Meet Alfred Hitch-
cock’) which was probably the first of its kind in the United States.25 In
, a New Yorker profile admitted that Hitchcock was ‘mainly a local
phenomenon’ but said that the director’s followers ‘count it a poor month
in which New York doesn’t offer them at least one Hitchcock revival’.
The  Steps was said to have been revived in the city’s repertory cinemas
thirty-one times since its initial release.26 A ‘ Steps Club’ had opened
in the city, too. The writer James Thurber was one enthusiastic member,
and it is not at all surprising that the author of The Secret Life of Walter
Mitty would take great pleasure in the fantastic adventures of Richard
Hannay. Thurber had seen the film six times by , and he and the
other club members discussed issues such as the guilt of Mr Memory:
was he somehow duped by the spies or was he a willing accomplice?
Even Alfred Hitchcock and Alma Reville, who were called upon to
comment on this point, could not agree upon an answer.27
The smaller-scale success that The  Steps found in New York and
THE 39 STEPS 90

Minneapolis foreshadows the more limited and specialized releases that

subsequent British films, including the comedies made under Michael
Balcon’s supervision at Ealing Studios, would find in post-war America.
By then, an ‘art house’ circuit provided an alternative niche for British
films, and a means for British films to be shown in the United States
without competing against Hollywood’s mainstream. In the mid-s,
though, Balcon and Gaumont-British had hoped that their films would
prove to be popular and mainstream box-office hits across the United
States, and they had invested production funds accordingly. For a brief
moment in September , when The  Steps was doing so well at the
huge Roxy Theatre, it appeared that this strategy might be successful.
Gaumont-British’s American distribution office informed the London
office: ‘We’re pretty bucked-up by the success of The  Steps at the
Roxy. I believe it is putting new life into our sales force and is going to
help tremendously. This is the first time we have made money for the
exhibitors.’28
The two-week engagement at the Roxy proved to be the high point
of the film’s American release, though, and most of Gaumont-British’s
other ‘star-spangled specials’ did not achieve even this modest level of
success. In the end, then, David did not slay Goliath. The company’s
ambitions were dashed and production was scaled back considerably by
. Despite these wider problems, The  Steps was clearly a succès
d’estime in the United States, and it advanced the careers of nearly all
of those involved in its making. Within a few years of its release, all of
the principal contributors – Michael Balcon, Charles Bennett, Madeleine
Carroll, Robert Donat and Alfred Hitchcock – had been successfully
courted by Hollywood studios. This was hardly the outcome that Balcon
and others would have hoped for, but it is none the less a tribute to the
film and to those who made it.

INITIAL CRITICAL VIEWS

Of the many and varied responses that critics had to The  Steps, few
were so dramatic as the one published by the entertainment trade news-
paper Variety. The critic had been to the film’s London première and
reported back to the United States, ‘Yes, they can make pictures in
England. This one proves it.’29 Other American trade newspapers also
felt obliged to assure their readers that The  Steps was a truly ex-
ceptional British film. The Hollywood Reporter stated plainly that ‘the
picture has a definite market in America’.30 The Motion Picture Daily
P O S T- P R O D U C T I O N 91

cited the film’s ‘speed, suspense and imagination in detail’ and said that
Hitchcock had ‘an American sense of box-office values’.31 And the
second review in Variety, published at the time of the New York release,
assured readers that the film ‘is not English in any stylised sense’.32
Kinematograph Weekly, the leading British trade paper, was not so pre-
judiced against British films, and instead praised the combination of
action, comedy and romance, and deemed the film to be a ‘spectacular
espionage comedy’ which also benefited from a ‘big box office cast’.33
Outside the film industry’s trade press, most reviews were favourable
and found similar grounds for praising The  Steps: its pace, the
combination of suspense and comedy, and the stars’ performances were
consistently commended. The highly regarded British critic C. A. Le-
jeune offered a particularly perceptive review in the Observer, in which
she noted influences upon the film as well as its own specific achieve-
ments:
Mr Donat, who has never been very well served in the cinema until now,
suddenly blossoms out into a romantic comedian of no mean order …
[H]e strikes … an easy confident humour that has always been regarded
as the perquisite of the American male star. For the first time on our
screen we have the British equivalent of a Clark Gable or a Ronald
Colman, playing in a purely national idiom. Mr Donat, himself, I fancy,
is hardly conscious of it, which is all to the good. Mr Hitchcock is
certainly conscious of it, and exploits his new star material with all the
easy confidence of a local Van Dyke or Capra.34
Donat was almost universally admired. There was less praise for
Madeleine Carroll, but critics did approve of her new manner. The
reviewer for the Monthly Film Bulletin, for example, was pleased to see
that she was ‘no longer dignified and austerely beautiful’, while the
Daily Telegraph observed that she ‘showed more spirit and flexibility
than usual’.35 Most of the reviews, however, focused their attention
squarely on Hitchcock. In London’s Sunday Times, for example, Sydney
Carroll admired many qualities of the film – the varied settings and
backgrounds, the dramatic use of minor characters, the humour, the
pace, the ‘pictorial’ storytelling – and he attributed all of them to
Hitchcock. In a review that seems to turn into a very early auteurist
manifesto, Carroll argued:
Every film of real quality bears the unforgettable stamp of its creator.
Individuality is a rare and precious thing. In moving pictures it is ex-
THE 39 STEPS 92

ceptionally hard to discover. When it is there, however, it usually assumes

a force and distinction unmistakably attributable to its director, and to its
director alone. In The  Steps, the identity and mind of Alfred Hitchcock
are continuously discernible, in fact supreme. Hitchcock is a genius.36

American critics also focused on Hitchcock. In Time, The  Steps

was said to be ‘the most effective demonstration to date of director
Alfred Hitchcock’s method of artful understatement’.37 Pare Lorentz,
who was then the reviewer for the monthly McCall’s, considered The 
Steps to be ‘in every way the best production of the month’ and pro-
claimed that the ‘chubby Cockney who directed it … has proved himself
one of the best movie-makers in the business’.38 The New York Times
reviewer, André Sennwald, said that Hitchcock ‘uses his camera the
way a painter uses his brush’ and, perhaps to the chagrin of Charles
Bennett, he also insisted that Hitchcock gave the story ‘values the scenar-
ists could hardly have suspected’.39 Sennwald even came close to using
the title that Hitchcock would enjoy later in his career when he referred
to the director as a ‘master of shock and suspense’.
By contrast with the American critics, a surprising number of British
critics were quite sparing in their praise for the film. Critics who wrote
for Britain’s film journals and ‘quality’ newspapers were particularly
likely to find faults. There are two likely explanations for this. First, the
British critics were already very aware of Hitchcock’s reputation. Ever
since The Lodger had been acclaimed as one of the best British films
ever made, Hitchcock had been a prominent, well known and highly
visible personality within British film culture. Some of the British critics
therefore felt obliged to approach the film as a test of his genius, and,
although the film was usually found to be entertaining, the idea that it
aspired to anything above and beyond conventional entertainment was
treated with some contempt. The critic for the New Statesman, for
example, argued that The  Steps ‘is more satisfactory if accepted as
entertainment than when considered strictly in terms of technique and
achievement’. The reviewer complained of ‘the little filmic tricks’ that
were either ‘unpardonably clumsy’ or ‘downright tiresome ’, citing in
particular the film’s opening and the montage that includes the char-
woman’s scream. Hitchcock was trying to be ‘obscure and artful’ and as
a result the film suffered from a ‘peculiar dilettantism’.40 In Sight and
Sound, Alistair Cooke also complained that the film ‘opens confusedly
and trickily’, but Cooke thought that it ‘stays confused’ throughout its
running time. He thought that the mix of suspense and humour was
P O S T- P R O D U C T I O N 93

uneven, and that Hitchcock’s attempt to emulate Frank Capra’s observa-

tional powers was ‘unobservant and academic’.41 The novelist Graham
Greene was another critic eager to cut Hitchcock down to size. In the
Fortnightly Review, Greene singled out the charwoman’s scream as an
example of Hitchcock’s limitations. ‘All Hitchcock is saying … is that
the charwoman’s scream is like the whistle of the express [train] coming
out of the tunnel,’ Greene said, and came to the conclusion that Hitch-
cock’s films generally were ‘tricky’ and ‘not imaginative’.42
The second factor behind the critical disdain is that The  Steps did
not sit easily with the critical attitudes and beliefs that predominated in
both Britain and the United States during this era. Serious film criticism
was centred primarily on notions of realism, and documentary films and
films of social commentary or observation were prized. These tended to
be sober and serious films on a contemporary theme, dealing with the
ordinary rather than the extraordinary and the real rather than the
fantastic. A film as fast-paced, humorous and filled with miraculous
escapes and unlikely coincidences as The  Steps was bound to be
somewhat discomforting to these critics. Hence, there was tendency to
complain that the story centred on unlikely events and coincidences.
Even in an otherwise laudatory review, for example, the critic for the
Daily Telegraph could not help but mention the ‘improbabilities’ in the
plot.43 The Monthly Film Bulletin referred to the ‘number of very lucky
accidents’ in the story.44 Otis Ferguson of the American New Republic
gave the film its most frequently quoted compliment when he called it
‘a miracle of speed and light’ but he went on to say: ‘The story is
hokum. You have to accept that at the start and keep accepting it.’45
Graham Greene complained more generally that Hitchcock’s films had
‘an inadequate sense of reality’ and that there was ‘an air of caricature’
in his use of London settings. His more specific complaint about The 
Steps, however, was that the plotting is ‘so careless’. Why, he wondered,
was Hannay’s return journey from Scotland to the London Palladium
so easy when the earlier journey from London to Scotland had been so
difficult?46 If Hitchcock was not aware of Greene’s specific criticism, he
was certainly well aware of this type of criticism. Thirty years later,
when speaking to François Truffaut about The  Steps, the conversation
led on to a lengthy exchange about film critics and the issue of
‘plausibility’. This is when Hitchcock offered his famous definition of
drama as ‘life with the dull bits cut out’, and added that ‘the critic who
talks to me about plausibility is a dull fellow’.47
THE 39 STEPS 94

SUBSEQUENT CRITICAL VIEWS

While The  Steps was considered to be a very well made and enter-
taining film in the s, few were willing to go so far as Sydney Carroll
and declare it to be the work of a genius. By the turn of the century,
however, The  Steps was perceived as a key work of one of the
century’s greatest film directors, as well as one of the best British films
ever made. The transformation began slowly. The first retrospective
and favourable views tended to cite specific moments or elements of the
film rather than praise it as a whole. Lewis Jacobs’s pioneering account
of American film history, The Rise of the American Film, first published
in , discusses Hitchcock as the ‘brilliant English director’ and as one
of the Europeans who contributed to the ‘development of the art of
sound’ in films. The charwoman’s scream from The  Steps is singled
out as an example of the director’s ‘imaginative and dramatic flair for
sound’. Oddly, Jacobs also refers to a sequence in which the ‘rhythmic
noise of the train’s wheels’ is synchronized with a ‘disembodied voice
which keeps repeating “he mustn’t, he mustn’t, he mustn’t”’.48 This is a
marvellous observation, and the effect would not be out of place in the
film, but, alas, it is an observation that cannot be verified in any currently
available print. Many subsequent surveys of film history have also
praised the charwoman’s scream in discussing the use of sound or editing
techniques, and indeed the sequence must now rank as one of the most
discussed moments in film history.49
Given the rather unsympathetic terms in which ‘serious’ critics judged
The  Steps in the s, it is perhaps surprising that the filmmaker and
critic Lindsay Anderson was one of the first to offer a more sympathetic
assessment of the film. As an advocate of ‘free cinema’, Anderson was
more committed than most to notions of realism and social relevance.
Yet in  he wrote one of the first retrospectives on Hitchcock’s career,
and expressed some admiration for the British thrillers. Unlike other
commentators, Anderson did not see the films’ fantastic elements as
problematic.50 Instead, he asserted that it was this combination of the
ordinary and the fantastic that made the films compelling. He admired
the use of London locations and particularly the focus upon the lower-
middle-class settings; he praised the ‘credible lack of extravagance’
surrounding the leading characters; and was equally impressed with the
‘authentic minor characters – maids, policemen, shopkeepers and com-
mercial travellers’ seen in the Gaumont-British thrillers: ‘these films gain
a particular excitement from their concern with ordinary people (or
P O S T- P R O D U C T I O N 95

ordinary looking people) who are plunged into extraordinary happen-

ings in the most ordinary places. This gives them immense conviction,
and enables Hitchcock to exploit to the utmost his flair for the dramatic
value of contrast.’51
At best, however, Anderson considered the films to be minor works
of art; they had no significant ‘message ’ and their director was not
‘serious’. Moreover, the purpose of Anderson’s retrospective was not
simply to praise Hitchcock’s British films, but also to consider the short-
comings of his Hollywood films. Anderson states that, from the time
the director left Britain in , he had become ‘committed to all that is
worst in Hollywood’, including the use of stars, ‘glossy photography’,
glamorous settings and ‘lushly hypnotic musical scores’.52 The  Steps
and the other British thrillers were only to be admired, it seems, when
they were compared with the reprehensible grandeur of the director’s
Hollywood films.
Anderson’s views were widely shared among highbrow critics in
both Britain and the United States in the s and s. In terms of
‘theme’ and ‘message’, Hitchcock was considered to be a lightweight
director, but the British thrillers of the s were at least seen to have
the virtues of speed, humour and suspense. In the Hollywood films,
however, these virtues were said to have been submerged by slick
production values. This perspective on the director’s career became
particularly pronounced when the second version of The Man Who
Knew Too Much was released in . As Robert Kapsis has indicated,
critics took this occasion as another opportunity to recall the virtues of
Hitchcock’s s British thrillers and to complain about Hitchcock’s
Hollywood films. The British version was seen to be lean and swift: it
was filmed in black and white, it had no major stars, and its running
time was a fast-moving seventy-four minutes. The remake, on the other
hand, hosted any number of Hollywood vices. It was filmed in Vista-
Vision, it was tailored to fit its well-known stars (at least in so far as
having Doris Day sing ‘Que Sera, Sera’), and its -minute running
time allowed the story’s ‘implausibilities’ (that familiar complaint) to
become overly apparent.53 A few years later, critics recognized North by
Northwest () as a reworking of The  Steps, and for one prominent
critic the earlier film was vastly superior to the later one. Stanley Kauff-
man wrote in the New Republic that: ‘The decline of Alfred Hitchcock
is no longer news. It is quite clear that the director of The Lady Vanishes
and The  Steps is dead and that an obscene ghost is mocking him by
superficially imitating him.’54 For Kauffman, Hitchcock was like ‘an old
THE 39 STEPS 96

whore struggling desperately for remembered rapture’ and he was no

longer able to capture the ‘the urgent, encompassing reality’ of the
British films.
For the most part, however, North by Northwest received favourable
reviews and it fuelled a reappraisal of Hitchcock’s work. The director’s
new advocates saw him as a serious and profound artist, who had reached
the zenith of his creative powers in Hollywood in the s. The British
films, in this critical context, came to be seen as mere apprentice work.
‘Who wants the leaf buds when the rose has opened?’ Robin Wood
asked in his landmark study Hitchcock’s Films (). This took an
approach to the director’s career that would soon become typical. The
films made in Hollywood during the s received in-depth analysis,
while earlier films (and particularly the British films) were given little or
no attention at all.55 The French critics (and filmmakers) Eric Rohmer
and Claude Chabrol paid more attention than most to the British films,
and were particularly appreciative of The  Steps. Yet in their own
ground-breaking study, Hitchcock: The First Forty-Four Films (),
they are so eager to make the case for Hitchcock as a serious artist that
they press the films into a rather rigid critical scheme. They saw Hitch-
cock first and foremost as a Catholic artist and a deeply moral filmmaker,
and they set out to reveal the director’s moral vision and his use of
‘Christian ideas and symbols’. So, for example, it is said that in The 
Steps Hannay is saved from Professor Jordan’s bullet because he has a
‘Bible’ in his pocket, and it is suggested that this is a sign of the moral
order of the ‘Hitchcockian universe’. The book in Hannay’s pocket is
not a Bible, though, it is a hymnbook; and the hymnbook belongs to a
moral hypocrite, the crofter. Furthermore, we discover that it is the
crofter’s book at the very moment in the film that he is heard striking
his meek wife on the soundtrack. If a moral order is demonstrated in this
scene, it is certainly a far more challenging one than Rohmer and Chabrol
are willing to explore. The film’s final scene is also put forth as a very
moral one, and one with specifically Catholic values. Mr Memory’s
recitation of the formula for the secret airplane engine, they insist, is an
example of the ‘mechanism of confession’ and its beneficial effect. Yet
this gives an importance to the character and particularly to his fate that
is not demonstrated in the film.56
While many of the early studies of Hitchcock’s films expressed some
measure of disdain for the British films, critics Peter Bogdanovich and
François Truffaut, who played such a central role in promoting Hitch-
cock’s reputation, expressed contempt for the very notion of British
P O S T- P R O D U C T I O N 97

cinema.57 Yet in their separate studies of the director’s career, Bog-

danovich and Truffaut considered The  Steps to be a somewhat special
case. It was said to be the best of Hitchcock’s British films, and this
proved to be an enduring (and limiting) reputation for the film. It was
of interest first and foremost for its archetypal qualities, and it was
particularly valued because it brought together most, if not all, of what
was deemed to be ‘Hitchcockian’: the innocent man who is wrongly
accused of a crime; the icy blonde heroine who is terrorized; the picar-
esque structure; the notion that the object of pursuit is not important
(the ‘MacGuffin’); the suspicious romance; the suave villain; the unsym-
pathetic police; the mixture of humour and suspense; and the climax in
a very public setting. Of course, most of these plot components and
character types are evident in the film. What seems misguided and
limiting is the idea that such components are always used to the same
effect, and the more general assumption that because The  Steps is an
earlier film it is necessarily a lesser film.
By the mid-s, the idea that Hitchcock’s work was deeply
misogynistic was taken for granted. In From Reverence to Rape, Molly
Haskell’s study of ‘the treatment of women in the movies’, The  Steps
is seen as providing early evidence of the ‘excruciating ordeals’ and
‘long trips through terror’ that Hitchcock’s heroines would have to
endure, ‘in which they might be raped, violated by birds, [and] killed’.
Even John Russell Taylor, Hitchcock’s sympathetic and authorized bio-
grapher (Hitch, ), sees Carroll’s role in the film as ‘the first obvious
instance of his normal treatment of cool blondes, into which all sorts of
sadistic sexual motives can be read’.58 Yet if one considers Carroll’s role
in a different context, the preoccupation with misogyny and sadism
soon loses credibility. Sue Harper, for example, asserts that Carroll was
one of a new breed of ‘wholesome sensible girls’ that emerged in British
cinema of the s: ‘Equipped with brisk verbal delivery, their gaze
was direct and unambiguous. Their textual effect is bracing, and they
are clearly intended to evoke confidence in a new social order. [They]
were designed to give the audience confidence in modernity – to let
them see that women could be spirited and pure at the same time.’59
Interestingly, two of Hitchcock’s other s heroines, Nova Pilbeam
and Margaret Lockwood, are also included in this category. Harper’s
description of Carroll, Pilbeam and Lockwood (among others) as ‘girls
who take matters into their own hands’ fits well with the s thrillers,
in which the female leads play a key role in solving the mystery.60
The auteur critics also insisted that The  Steps offers an early and
THE 39 STEPS 98

definitive example of the MacGuffin in action. Both John Russell Taylor

and Donald Spoto (The Dark Side of Genius, ), situate the film in
this way. Their view is that because the mystery at the heart of the film
– the formula for the silent airplane engine in The  Steps – is of little
dramatic importance to the audience, the story is essentially apolitical
and unrelated to the wider world. In this context, then, there is little
difference between The  Steps and North by Northwest; both are un-
concerned with the implications of their espionage plots and both are
unrelated to the time period in which they were made. Indeed, in Spoto’s
view, the vague nature of the MacGuffin renders the theme of The 
Steps (‘political intrigue and depravity’) universal rather than specific.61
William Rothman (in Hitchcock: The Murderous Gaze, ) also
understands the film entirely in terms of Hitchcock’s authorship. Indeed,
the auteur theory has rarely been taken to such an extreme degree.
Nearly every aspect of the film is attributed to ‘Hitchcock’s design’. Yet
at the same time, the careful and rigorous attention that Rothman pays
to camerawork and the processes of identification is clearly illuminating.
Rothman’s view that The  Steps offers Hitchcock’s ‘first complete
protagonist and figure of identification’ leads to a detailed and fruitful
observation of the relationship between the audience and Robert Donat.
Rothman also discusses the influence of Capra on the film, but this is a
rare admission of a world beyond the film and its maker.62 Of the auteur
critics, only the British critic Raymond Durgnat (The Strange Case of
Alfred Hitchcock, ) took much interest in the historical context of
The  Steps. Durgnat points out that Professor Jordan is suggestive of
Oswald Mosley (the wealthy leader of the British Union of Fascists),
that Jordan’s men wear Gestapo-style coats, that Hannay’s travels are
set against a volatile social backdrop, and that the film offers a warning
against complacency. Yet Durgnat insists that Hitchcock should have
gone further in this regard, and so (like Taylor and Spoto) he seems
unaware of the constraints posed by the censors in the s.63
More recently, much greater interest has developed in British cinema
generally, and also in contextual film history. In Alfred Hitchcock and the
British Cinema (), Tom Ryall emphasizes the influences of British
film culture and the British film industry on Hitchcock’s work. Ryall is
not concerned with textual analysis, but he places great emphasis on The
 Steps as a genre film, as one film within the ‘classic thriller sextet’,
which developed within the ‘stable studio context’ of Gaumont-British.
Charles Barr’s English Hitchcock () also considers The  Steps in
the context of Gaumont-British and suggests that it was shaped by
P O S T- P R O D U C T I O N 99

‘Balcon, Bennett, Buchan and … Hitler’. On the one hand, then, English
Hitchcock is an exploration of the development of Hitchcock’s imagina-
tion and his preoccupations; and Buchan’s sense of ‘adventure, fantasy
and international intrigue’ figure strongly in this regard. On the other
hand, there is a concern to acknowledge the skill of key collaborators
such as Charles Bennett. The analysis of The  Steps, for example,
centres on the ‘carefully tight, symmetrical construction’ of the story.64
The work of both Barr and Ryall is also significant for the assumption
that the British films are worthy of study and appreciation in their own
right, and not simply because they were the forerunners of Hitchcock’s
later American films. They provide effective rebuttals to the chauvinism
of Peter Bogdanovich and François Truffaut, whose studies of Hitch-
cock suggested that being English was an unfortunate hindrance for a
filmmaker, and one that Hitchcock had to go to Hollywood to overcome.

AFTER-LIFE AND INFLUENCE

In various ways and forms, The  Steps has enjoyed many more lives
since its release in . The film (as opposed to the novel) has itself
been adapted, remade and rereleased over and over again, and its in-
fluence on other films and filmmakers has been extensive. The very
latest adaptation, a stage version that toured Britain in the late s,
provides an indication of the extent to which the film has overtaken and
even infiltrated Buchan’s story. This stage version is billed as ‘John
Buchan’s The  Steps’ and uses some aspects of the story that belong
solely to the novel, such as the characters Franklin P. Scudder and Sir
Walter Bullivant, but also some elements that belong to the film. For
example, Mr Memory and Pamela are included, and the setting is the
s.65 It is only one of the many hybrid versions of The  Steps that
have appeared over the past sixty-five years. The novel and the film
seem to feed off and sustain one another’s popularity, with the result
that the story has endured in many different forms over the decades.
Several generations of readers, viewers and listeners know, or think that
they know, who, what and where the thirty-nine steps might be.
The first adaptation of the film was made in  by the Lux Radio
Theatre, a weekly radio programme produced and introduced by Cecil
B. DeMille from Hollywood. Each week, Lux adapted a recent feature
film into a one-hour radio play. The films appear to have been chosen
on the basis of their critical status and cultural importance rather than
entirely on the basis of commercial success. The  Steps was the first
THE 39 STEPS 100

British film ever chosen, and the programme follows the film (as opposed
to the novel) faithfully. One interesting aspect of the Lux programmes
is that they offer an opportunity to hear an alternative cast take on
familiar roles. Major Hollywood stars took part. In this case, Robert
Montgomery plays Richard Hannay, an appropriate choice given that
Montgomery’s suave and gentlemanly manner was not too far from
that of Robert Donat, and Pamela is played by the British-born actress
Ida Lupino. The programme also offers a chance to hear how The 
Steps might have turned out if the film had been made by a Hollywood
studio in the s. Perhaps not surprisingly, there is less innuendo and
little menace in the air by comparison with the film; Lux was made for
prime-time family listeners. It was left to another radio programme, the
Mercury Theatre on the Air, to produce a more compellingly sinister
version in . In this version, Orson Welles plays Hannay and there
is no Pamela; the Mercury Theatre made one of the very few faithful
adaptations of the novel. Yet even in this instance the novel could not
completely escape from its connection with the film. Welles felt obliged
to tell his listeners at the outset that they should not expect to find
‘Madeleine Carroll’ in his adaptation of Buchan’s story.
The  Steps was also remade twice for the screen. Hitchcock himself
apparently considered remaking the film in . He had just finshed
with the remake of The Man Who Knew Too Much, and his friend Angus
MacPhail, who had been a story editor at Gaumont-British, had joined
him to work on the second version of that film. When they finished,
MacPhail tried to convince Hitchcock that he should follow The Man
Who Knew Too Much with The  Steps, just as he had done in the s.
His reasoning was that this time they could follow the book more
closely.66 Although Hitchcock was apparently not as enthusiastic as
MacPhail, he did check to see if the screen rights to Buchan’s novel were
available. They were not. The Rank Organisation, which absorbed
Gaumont-British’s holdings in the s, had recently renewed its owner-
ship of the story and in fact Rank was developing its own remake.67 This
was made in  by producer Betty Box and director Ralph Thomas.
Although it claims to be ‘based on the novel by John Buchan’ and does
not offer any credit to the screenwriting team of , it actually follows
the original film on an almost scene-for-scene basis. This is not to say
that it in any way approaches the quality of the original. As played by
Kenneth More, Richard Hannay is so casual and sure of himself that
nothing important seems to be at stake in the film. The crucial elements
of sex, murder and mayhem are diminished, too. For example, in the
P O S T- P R O D U C T I O N 101

place of Annabella Smith, the exotically alluring foreign spy, there is an

English nanny who sets the story in motion. In short, it is a bland and
uninvolving film. The Rank Organisation produced another version in
, with Robert Powell as Hannay and direction by Don Sharp. This
film has far more ambition and purpose, and it does follow Buchan’s
story more closely. Yet there are still numerous and knowing Hitch-
cockian reference points within this enjoyable and brisk thriller.68 Oddly,
though, the s version seems to have dated far more than the 
original. This is partly because of its fascination with the lovingly
prepared period setting – every scene seems to have a vintage car or a
stately home in it – and partly because of its insipid romance. Even the
filmmakers striving to be faithful to Buchan felt obliged to have a ‘love
interest’, but this is a particularly pointless and decorative one.
Long before these remakes appeared, the original version of The 
Steps was copied many times and in many ways. For Hitchcock, as we
have seen, the film was only the second entry in a ‘sextet’ of films made
between  and . The last of these, The Lady Vanishes (), was
a nearly explicit critique of appeasement made in the year of Munich.
It seems fitting, then, that when Hitchcock teamed up again with Charles
Bennett in Hollywood, it was to make Foreign Correspondent (), a
film which makes a nearly explicit appeal for intervention in the peak
year of American isolationism. Far from being apolitical, Hitchcock’s
thrillers were particularly useful because they circumvented censorship
(in both Britain and the USA) in order to address the most controversial
and heated concerns of their times. For other British filmmakers, mean-
while, The  Steps not only established the popularity of the spy thriller
but also focused attention on the spy thriller as a means of dramatizing
the coming of war and the threats that this entails. Dark Journey (),
Q Planes (), The Spy in Black (), Contraband (), Night Train
to Munich () and Cottage to Let () are among its descendants.
One can also find elements of The  Steps in the invasion drama Went
the Day Well? (), at least in so far as the traitor who facilitates the
German invasion of an English village is the trusted and respected village
squire. The scene in The Third Man () in which Holly Martins is
away from home, out of his depth and forced to give an impromptu
speech to a hostile audience would also seem to be directly inspired by
The  Steps. Ironically, both of these films were based on stories by
Graham Greene, whose public pronouncements never admitted to much
respect or admiration for The  Steps.
In Hollywood, meanwhile, the makers of It’s a Wonderful World
THE 39 STEPS 102

() borrowed much of the plot of The  Steps. Jimmy Stewart, an

innocent man on the run, escapes from a train. He is handcuffed to the
wealthy Claudette Colbert. They hate one another while they fall in
love and there is even a climax in a theatre. But before accusing this film
of plagiarism, it should be pointed out that It’s a Wonderful World was
directed by W. S. Van Dyke, who had also directed The Thin Man, and
Colbert had been the star of It Happened One Night. Thus, It’s a Wonder-
ful World is actually a hybrid of another kind, bringing together various
elements (and players) of some of the key screwball comedies of the
s. Wartime thrillers such as Man Hunt (), Above Suspicion ()
and Hitchcock’s own Saboteur () carried on the theme of rousing
the complacent. Each centres on a naive civilian who is caught up in a
web of professional espionage at the outset of the war. Perhaps the
most notable descendant of The  Steps was a spoof of spy films rather
than a true thriller. My Favorite Blonde () recalls The  Steps with
scenes set on trains, a couple bound by handcuffs and even Madeleine
Carroll as the eponymous blonde. The film is very much Bob Hope ’s
vehicle, though, and its success at the box-office probably far exceeded
that of The  Steps in the United States. After the war, the director
Stanley Kramer put a couple in handcuffs too, but in The Defiant Ones
() the handcuffed couple bound together over a long and dangerous
journey are two escaping convicts. More importantly, one is black, the
other is a white racist, and they are stuck together and dependent upon
one another to make their escape successful. The mechanism for a
screwball comedy thus became a mechanism for a social problem film.
With the release of North by Northwest in , however, it becomes
rather difficult to isolate the influence of The  Steps. As Jocelyn Camp
has observed, in some ways North by Northwest owes more to Buchan
than The  Steps.69 Hence, these cultural reference points – Buchan,
Hitchcock, the novel, the films – collide and become inextricably bound
together. A wide array of films, ranging from the James Bond series, the
futuristic thriller Twelve Monkeys (), the hi-tech ‘yarn’ Mission
Impossible () and the code-cracking drama Enigma (), draw
upon and pay homage to these influences. Indeed, wherever there is an
innocent man wrongly accused, a sinister foreign conspiracy, a plot so
swift that its improbabilities pass without notice, a protagonist capable
of extricating himself from the tightest of corners, some hi-tech gadgetry
threatening the hero, a mix of tongue-in-cheek humour and moments of
real terror, and especially a blonde and a pair of handcuffs, there is at
least a touch of The  Steps.
P O S T- P R O D U C T I O N 103

The trouble with discussing the influence of The  Steps, of course,

is that it makes it seem as though the film is mainly interesting as a
precedent and that its descendants are somehow further developed. The
topic could, in fact, occupy an entire book itself, and it is one that I have
purposefully skated over here. It seems to me far more significant that
The  Steps itself has continued to gather an audience over successive
generations. Whether it is through frequent television screenings, video
and DVD releases or revivals in the cinema, audiences have continued
to laugh and gasp and go along for the ride that the film offers. The
critics and filmmakers who placed the film so highly in the BFI’s poll
undoubtedly admired its expressive visual design, the inventive use of
sound, the compelling camerawork, and the acting and direction. It is a
film that will intrigue anyone interested in cinema. For a wider audience,
its appeal may rest in its range of moods and the skill with which it
moves through them. There is wit but it is dry wit; there is romance but
only in the most unsentimental terms; there is a hero but he is a reluctant
one; there are fantastic adventures but they are portrayed within a world
that seems almost defiantly normal and undisturbed. The ‘under-
statement of highly dramatic ideas’ is what Hitchcock admired about
Buchan’s story, and this paradoxical quality is also a fundamental part
of the film’s appeal.70
 Epilogue

The  Steps was but one step in the career of many remarkably talented
and productive filmmakers. For some it was an early step on the way to
further or greater success, while for others it was probably their most
memorable career achievement. The information offered below provides
some indication of what happened to some of the more prominent
people, and where this one film stands in their career histories.
Peggy Ashcroft (–) was one of the most distinguished actresses
of her time. In the year after making The  Steps, she enjoyed one of
the early highlights of her career when she co-starred with Laurence
Olivier and John Gielgud in a now famous stage production of Romeo
and Juliet. Nearly fifty years after appearing in The  Steps, she won an
Academy Award for her role (as Mrs Moore) in A Passage to India
().
Michael Balcon (–) left Gaumont-British when the company
abandoned its ambitious production policy. In , he became the
executive producer of an even more ambitious production company,
MGM-British, but he produced only one film, A Yank at Oxford (),
before his relationship with the Hollywood mogul Louis B. Mayer
soured. He then served as the head of production at Ealing Studios
from  until , and there he abandoned the idea of making ‘inter-
national’ films. Among the many notable films produced under his
supervision were the Ealing comedies.
Charles Bennett (–) went to Hollywood in . He col-
laborated with Hitchcock again on Foreign Correspondent () and
Saboteur (), but worked mainly for producer Cecil B. DeMille and
later wrote for television. At the time of his death he was said to be
developing a new and updated screenplay of Blackmail.
John Buchan (–) served as Governor-General of Canada for
five years before his sudden death in . He was the author of over
 books.
Madeleine Carroll (–) appeared in one more Hitchcock film,
EPILOGUE 105

The Secret Agent (), before returning to Hollywood and appearing

in high-profile films such as Lloyds of London () and The Prisoner
of Zenda (). Her roles in these films were largely decorative, though,
and The  Steps remained the highlight of her career. The death of her
sister in an air raid prompted Carroll to return to London in , and
she dedicated herself to working with the Red Cross.
Frank Cellier (–) appeared in many films but is probably
best remembered for playing Sam Grundy in Love on the Dole ().
Robert Donat (–) became one of Britain’s most popular stars as
a result of The  Steps. Hitchcock hoped that Donat would star in
Sabotage () but he had to settle instead for the actor John Loder.
Donat had already turned down the role taken by Errol Flynn in Warner
Brothers’ Captain Blood () because he did not want to work in
Hollywood. Instead he starred in a succession of very popular British
films, including The Ghost Goes West (), Knight without Armour
() and MGM’s The Citadel () and Goodbye Mr Chips (). He
won an Academy Award for his role as Mr Chips, beating Clark Gable,
who had been nominated for Gone with the Wind. In subsequent years,
and partly because of chronic ill health, Donat made relatively few
films.
Alfred Hitchcock (–) was criticized (by Michael Balcon among
others) for leaving Britain as the country prepared for war in . His
contract with the Hollywood producer David Selznick offered similar
opportunities to those he enjoyed at Gaumont-British in its most ex-
pansive and ambitious phase: some measure of independence, better
production values, top stars and wider international distribution of the
films. He directed fifty-three feature films over the course of a career
that began with The Pleasure Garden () and ended with Family Plot
().
John Laurie (–) appeared in many more British films and in
the s played Private James Frazer in the television series Dad’s Army.
Lucie Mannheim (–) continued to appear in British films,
notably The Yellow Canary (), The Tawny Pipit () and Bunny
Lake is Missing (). She married the British actor Marius Goring in
 and returned to Germany after the war.
Ivor Montagu (–) left Gaumont-British in  and went to
Spain, where he made documentary films supporting the Republicans
during the Civil War. He worked for the Ministry of Information during
the Second World War and with Balcon again at Ealing Studios after the
war.
THE 39 STEPS 106

Godfrey Tearle (–) appeared in many more films, and his

resemblance to Franklin Roosevelt eventually led to him portraying the
former president in The Beginning or the End ().
Penrose Tennyson (–) married the actress Nova Pilbeam, who
appeared in both The Man Who Knew Too Much () and Young and
Innocent (). He was said to be Britain’s youngest film director when
he directed The Proud Valley () for Ealing. He was killed while
engaged in military service.
Wylie Watson (–) had been a music-hall performer in the
s. He appeared in dozens of films following The  Steps, including
Hitchcock’s Jamaica Inn ().
 Notes

INTRODUCTION

. Or, as Buchan’s biographer puts it: ‘Richard Hannay dashing up to Galloway

in search of the Black Stone gang had compensated for John Buchan marooned
in bed at Broadstairs and feeling that he was no use to anybody’ (Smith, John
Buchan, p. ).
. Spoto, The Dark Side of Genius, p. .
. Ibid., p. .
. Hitchcock, ‘My Screen Memories’, in Gottlieb (ed.), Hitchcock on Hitchcock,
p. .
. Behlmer (ed.), Memo from David O. Selznick, p. .
. Truffaut with Scott, Hitchcock, p. .
. Hitchcock, ‘Close Your Eyes and Visualize’, in Gottlieb (ed.), Hitchcock on
Hitchcock, p. .

1. PRODUCTION CONTEXT

. Smith, John Buchan, p. .

. Hitchcock with J. K. Newnham, ‘My Screen Memories’, in Gottlieb (ed.),
Hitchcock on Hitchcock, pp. –. This article originally appeared in the British
film magazine Film Weekly in May .
. Truffaut with Scott, Hitchcock, p. .
. After interviewing Charles Bennett, Donald Spoto also wrote: ‘Bennett was of
the opinion that, for all its breathless pacing, the book was devoid of character,
humour and any potential for audience involvement’ (Spoto, The Dark Side of
Genius, p. ).
. Joe Macbeth () is a British gangster film loosely based on the original play
(Durgnat, The Strange Case of Alfred Hitchcock, p. ).
. In , Hitchcock told a interviewer for the New York Times that he admired
these authors ‘because they use multiple chases and a lot of psychology’
(D. Brady, ‘Core of the Movie: The Chase’, reprinted in Gottlieb [ed.], Hitch-
cock on Hitchcock, p. ).
. Bennett gave interviews to both Patrick McGilligan and John Belton which
stressed the importance and centrality of his own contributions to Hitchcock’s
films and particularly to The  Steps (see Belton, ‘Charles Bennett and the
THE 39 STEPS 108

Typical Hitchcock Scenario’, pp. –; and McGilligan [ed.], Backstory ,

pp. –).
. Smith, John Buchan, pp. –.
. His financial status is defined on the very first page of the story with the words
‘I had got my pile – not one of the big ones, but good enough for me’ (Buchan,
The Thirty-Nine Steps, p. ).
. Ibid., p. .
. Kipling’s ‘On the Gate’ is discussed in Richards, Visions of Yesterday, p. .
. For a well-balanced discussion of anti-Semitism in Buchan’s fiction see Lownie,
John Buchan, pp. –.
. Buchan, The Thirty-Nine Steps, p. .
. Ibid., p. .
. Ibid., p. .
. Ibid., p. .
. As Hitchcock explained, ‘the police are after him, so he can’t go to them, can
he?’ (Bogdanovich, The Cinema of Alfred Hitchcock, pp. –).
. Spoto, The Dark Side of Genius, p. .
. The TLS review is quoted in Lownie, John Buchan, pp. –.
. Buchan, The Thirty-Nine Steps, p. .
. Ibid., pp. –.
. Ivor Montagu’s comments are reported in Taylor, Hitch, p. .
. In fact, when The  Steps was on release in the summer of  it was playing
in Britain at the same time as the recruiting film R.A.F. (). See Short,
Screening the Propaganda of British Air Power, p. .
. Like the Hollywood studios, Gaumont-British was involved in production,
distribution and exhibition, and its own cinemas included some of Britain’s
largest and most opulent ‘dream palaces’.
. John Sedgwick has demonstrated that Gaumont-British’s films came second
only to those of the Hollywood giant MGM at the British box-office (Sedgwick,
Popular Filmgoing in s Britain, p. ).
. For a detailed and wider account of Gaumont-British’s ‘close encounter with
the American market’, see ibid., pp. –.
. The ‘star-spangled specials’ label was used only in American advertising for
Gaumont-British films. The  Steps was one of sixteen of the studio’s films to
be marketed this way in  (‘Pressbook: The  Steps’, British Film Institute,
pp. –).
. Truffaut, Hitchcock, p. .
. At the time this was written, the German film director Ernst Lubitsch was one
of the most admired and acclaimed directors in the world, and his sophisticated
humour and style were referred to as ‘the Lubitsch Touch’. Hitchcock was
referred to as ‘our Lubitsch’ in a review of The Ring in the Sunday Express
(Sunday Express,  October , The Hitchcock Scrapbooks: The Ring, Alfred
Hitchcock Collection, Margaret Herrick Library, Academy of Motion Picture
Arts and Sciences, Beverly Hills, California [hereafter AHC/AMPAS]).
NOTES 109

. Truffaut, Hitchcock, p. .

. For the different perspectives on these events, see the interview with Charles
Bennett in McGilligan, Backstory , pp. –; the interview with Hitchcock in
Truffaut, Hitchcock, pp. –; and Michael Balcon’s autobiography, Michael
Balcon Presents …, pp. –.
. Truffaut, Hitchcock, p. .
. See for example Phillips, Alfred Hitchcock, p. ; Rohmer and Chabrol, Hitch-
cock, pp. –; and Taylor, Hitch, p. .
. Hitchcock, ‘Close Your Eyes and Visualise’, in Gottlieb (ed.), Hitchcock on
Hitchcock, p. .
. Balcon, Michael Balcon Presents …, p. .
. Normally, Werndorff was in charge of art direction at Gainsborough and Junge
was in charge at Lime Grove. It is not clear why Werndorff worked on The 
Steps, The Secret Agent and Sabotage, while Junge worked on The Man Who
Knew Too Much and Young and Innocent. All of these films were made at Lime
Grove. Tim Bergfelder discusses their influence in ‘Surface and Distraction:
Style and Genre at Gainsborough in the Late s and s’, pp. –.
. Conrad Veidt starred in both films, Junge was art director for both, and Jew
Suss was directed by Lothar Mendes.
. Richards, The Age of the Dream Palace, p. .
. Montagu told the story of Woolf ’s interference twice. In his own article,
‘Working with Hitchcock’, he named the musical that Woolf proposed as Lily
of Laguna. When interviewed by Alan Lovell, he named it as The Floradora
Girl. See Montagu, ‘Working with Hitchcock’, pp. –; and Lovell, ‘Inter-
view: Ivor Montagu’, p. .
. Robertson, The British Board of Film Censors, p. .
. When the censors first read the script in January  there were concerns
about the scene in which the crofter and his wife are in bed together, and the
scene in which Hannay and Pamela are handcuffed together in a bed. But they
were particularly concerned about the scene on the train in which a clergyman
looks on with curiosity as the commercial travellers handle women’s lingerie.
When none of these scenes was changed or cut, the finished film received an
‘A’ rating on  May . This meant that children under the age of sixteen
could not see the film unless they were accompanied by an adult (The  Steps,
BBFC Scenario Reports for , Special Collections, British Film Institute).
. Montagu, ‘Working with Hitchcock’, p. .
. Hitchcock told an interviewer from Life magazine about his working methods
and the making of The  Steps. (See Life,  November , pp. –.) Other
accounts of the screenwriting process can be found in McGilligan (ed.), Back-
story , pp. –; Taylor, Hitch, pp. –; and Spoto, The Dark Side of
Genius, pp. –.
. McGilligan (ed.), Backstory , pp. –.
. Ibid., p. .
. There are actually two copies of this script in the collection, one with Alfred
THE 39 STEPS 110

Hitchcock’s name on the cover, the other with Joan Harrison’s name on the
cover. (Harrison was Hitchcock’s secretary at this time.) The two scripts are
identical. (‘The  Steps: Dialogue Script’, Folder , Box , AHC/AMPAS.)
. McGilligan (ed.), Backstory , p. .
. Ibid.
. Both stories follow Buchan’s structure closely. They are set in motion when a
spy passes a cryptic message to an innocent bystander just before dying. The
message then forces the bystander into a position of involvement and danger,
and a situation that otherwise would have been rather remote from them (i.e.
issues of national security) becomes both personal and threatening. Similarly,
whereas the world around the innocent character once seemed safe and even
dull, it suddenly is revealed to be charged with danger and conspiracy. In both
films the political conflict is intertwined with a personal one, and neither conflict
is settled until the very last frame of the film. There is also a sharp contrast of
settings (from the snowy Alps to the dark backstreets of Wapping in The Man
Who Knew Too Much, and from London’s East End to the glens of Scotland in
The  Steps).
. The Thin Man was released in London in July  and It Happened One Night
was released in September .
. ‘Mr. Balcon’s notes on The  Steps’, dated  November , File C, Balcon
Collection, British Film Institute (hereafter TBC/BFI).
. Variety,  April .
. ‘To the Managing Directors: Report by M. E. Balcon on the  Programme’,
dated  December , C, TBC/BFI.
. Ibid.
. Another factor behind the low price may have been that filmmakers had shown
little interest in Buchan’s work over the years. Huntingtower had been adapted
by Gainsborough in , but was the only one of Buchan’s novels to be
adapted for the screen prior to The  Steps. (Lownie, John Buchan, pp. –
.)
. Michael Balcon to Mark Ostrer (Joint Managing Director, Gaumont-British),
 January , C, TBC/BFI.
. Baxter was said to be obliged to appear in the BIP historical drama Drake of
England (). This explanation comes from an article written by Hitchcock
for Film Weekly in . It seems unlikely that Baxter would give up the
opportunity to work with Hitchcock and Donat at Gaumont-British in order
to make a film with director Arthur Woods and actor Matheson Lang at BIP.
(A. Hitchcock with J. K. Newnham, ‘My Screen Memories, in Gottlieb [ed.],
Hitchcock on Hitchcock, p. .)
. The budget is discussed in Balcon to Ostrer,  January , C, TBC/BFI.
. Ivor Montagu recalled that Hitchcock’s pre-production planning saved time
and money. (See Lovell, ‘Interview: Ivor Montagu’, p. .)
. The drawings not pictured here are set designs or storyboards of the following:
Hannay’s front door and the view of the street from his front window (two
drawings on one page), Hannay’s lobby, exterior view of the crofter’s cottage,
NOTES 111

the crofter’s kitchen, a forked road on the moors, the sheriff ’s office, the political
hall, the waterfall, the hump-backed bridge on the moors, the public area of the
inn, the bedroom at the inn, and the London Palladium hallway. The drawings
are held by the Stills, Posters and Design section of the British Film Institute
in London.
. Werndorff, ‘Art Direction’, p. .
. The shot was not actually used in the final film. A similar shot, showing these
three pursuers on the hilltop, was used, but Donat does not appear in it.
Nevertheless, the shot was planned in the storyboard and faithfully filmed, as
this photograph indicates.
. The Man Who Knew Too Much begins with a shot of a pair of hands leafing
through brochures for Swiss resorts, thus establishing the location of the first
scene.
. Werndorff, ‘Art Direction’, p. .
. Levy, Music for the Movies, p. .
. Bogdanovich, The Cinema of Alfred Hitchcock, p. .
. Hitchcock and Newnham, ‘My Screen Memories’, p. .
. Kinematograph Weekly,  January , p. .
. P. L. Mannock, ‘Hitchcock Starts on Buchan Thriller’, Kinematograph Weekly,
 January , p. .
. These stories are recounted in Barrow, Mr Chips, pp. –.
. Taylor, Hitch, p. .
. Barrow, Mr Chips, p. .
. Hitchcock and Newnham, ‘My Screen Memories’, p. .
. John Russell Taylor, for example, supposes that Hitchcock must have taken ‘a
gleeful delight in devising indignities for Madeleine Carroll to undergo’ (Taylor,
Hitch, pp. –).
. Montagu, ‘Working with Hitchcock’, p. .
. Barrow, Mr Chips, p. .
. Tennyson, Penrose Tennyson, p. .
. P. L. Mannock, ‘Palladium Rebuilt at Shepherd’s Bush’, Kinematograph Weekly,
 March , p. .
. P. L. Mannock, ‘Hitchcock Finishes Gaumont-British Spy Melodrama’, Kine-
matograph Weekly,  March , p. .
. An excellent internet site has full details of the locations used: www.
scotlandthemovie.co.uk

2. THE 39 STEPS

. Hitchcock, ‘Stodgy British Pictures’, in Gottlieb (ed.), Hitchcock on Hitchcock,

pp. –. The article was originally published in the  December  issue
of Film Weekly.
. Charles Bennett revealed to film historian John Belton that he was the man
THE 39 STEPS 112

walking with Hitchcock. See Belton, ‘Charles Bennett and the Typical Hitch-
cock Scenario’, p. .
. Both are from Hannay’s point of view. The first occurs when Hannay and
Annabella arrive at his flat, and she is seen hiding from the view of the windows.
The second is a shot from the front window of Hannay’s flat, looking down
at the two men who followed them from the music hall.
. Barr, English Hitchcock, p. .
. Hannay, of course, referred to Annabella Smith as a clergyman’s daughter, and
so the logic of dreams and the associations made by the unconscious could
explain his presence in the compartment (and in Hannay’s dream).
. Rothman, Hitchcock, p. .
. The town is not identified, but given the map that we have seen we can only
assume that it is meant to be Killin.
. The collapse of her hair-do all around her face is probably what keeps us from
recognizing Penrose Tennyson as he doubles for her in some of these shots.
. Rothman, Hitchcock, p. .
. Hence, when Hannay sleeps at home on the first night, we see Annabella
staggering towards him with the knife in her back before he actually wakes up.
When he falls asleep on the train to Scotland, we see the charwoman discover
Annabella’s body. At the crofter’s cottage, Margaret hears the car approaching
the cottage while Hannay sleeps. And when he is shot by Professor Jordan, we
see Margaret being hit by John.
. ‘The  Steps: Dialogue Script’, Folder , Box , AHC/AMPAS.

3 . P O S T- P R O D U C T I O N

. The Third Man (), Brief Encounter () and Lawrence of Arabia ()
were above The  Steps on the list. The films from the s listed in the text
were placed in the top fifty. See Guardian,  September , p. .
. Kinematograph Weekly,  June , p. .
. W. Buchan, John Buchan, p. .
. Kinematograph Weekly,  June , p. .
. Hitchcock himself confirms this theory. See Hitchcock, ‘How I Choose My
Heroines’, in Gottlieb (ed.), Hitchcock on Hitchcock, pp. –.
. The pressbook contains nineteen pages of articles, and many of them offer the
same information in slightly different formats. See, for example, ‘Girl Who
Wanted to be a Nun is Now a Famous Actress’, pp. –; and ‘Madeleine Carroll
Expresses Herself in Handcuffs’, p.  (Pressbook: The  Steps, British Film
Institute).
. Much is made of Donat’s mixed ancestry in the pressbook. Donat was said to
be ‘dashing and romantic’ and to have the background of a ‘fascinating gypsy’.
See ‘Ancestral History of Robert Donat Would Seem to Explain His Appeal as
Romantic Hero’, Pressbook: The  Steps, pp. –.
. ‘Catchphrases’, Pressbook: The  Steps, p. .
NOTES 113

. Low, Film Making in s Britain, p. .

. See, for example, Haskell, From Reverence to Rape, p. .
. Balcon was upset to see newspaper advertisements that acknowledged the film
was playing at a Gaumont-British theatre but did not state that it was a
Gaumont-British production (Michael Balcon to Mark Ostrer,  July , C,
TBC/BFI).
. Kinematograph Weekly,  June , pp. –.
. Kinematograph Weekly,  June , p. .
. See the ‘Exploitation’ column of Kinematograph Weekly for stories of how it
was publicized in towns across Britain during the months of December 
and January .
. According to Sedgwick’s figures, The  Steps ranked as the eighth most popular
film of  in Britain. This was the highest ranking Hitchcock achieved in the
years of this study,  to . By contrast, The Man Who Knew Too Much
ranked at number  in , and in  The Secret Agent ranked at number
 and Sabotage at . (Sedgwick, Popular Filmgoing in s Britain, pp. –
.)
. Variety,  January , p. .
. Reports reached London that the film was a ‘surprise hit’ in Australia, and that
it had been shown for four weeks of ‘solid business’ in downtown Sydney
despite a spring heatwave (Variety,  November , p. ).
. For a comparison of the performance of Gaumont-British’s films in the USA,
see Sedgwick, Popular Filmgoing in s Britain, p. .
. Samuel Cohen, ‘Send Only Supers: An Appeal and a Warning to British
Producers’, Kinematograph Weekly,  May , p. .
. Variety,  August , p. .
. Variety,  September , p. .
. See the box-office reports in Variety, running from August through October
.
. Variety,  October , p. .
. John Ford’s The Informer won the award for  (Kinematograph Weekly,
 January , p. ).
. The article was written by the British film critic C. A. Lejeune (see New York
Times,  December ).
. R. Maloney, ‘Alfred Joseph Hitchcock’, New Yorker,  September , p. .
Also cited in Ryall, Alfred Hitchcock and the British Cinema, p. .
. Thurber wondered why, if Mr Memory was an accomplice, did he answer
Hannay’s question at the Palladium? Thurber supposed that Mr Memory’s
desire to demonstrate his ‘prodigious feats of memory’ overcame his desire for
self-preservation. Hitchcock insisted that Mr Memory was the ‘conscious tool’
of the spies, and that he answers Hannay’s question only because he is ‘too
rattled’ to say that he does not know. Alma Reville pointed out, however, that
he does not implicate himself until he is dying backstage. The different points
of view were revealed in a profile of ‘pudgy little Alfred Hitchcock’ that
THE 39 STEPS 114

appeared in Life magazine while Hitchcock was making his first film in Holly-
wood (Rebecca). (See Life,  November , p. .)
. Arthur Lee (Gaumont-British Distribution Office, New York City) to Mark
Ostrer (Gaumont-British Managing Director),  September , C, TBC/
BFI.
. Variety,  June ; The  Steps: Clippings File, Margaret Herrick Library,
Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (hereafter Clippings File/
AMPAS).
. Hollywood Reporter,  June , Clippings File/AMPAS.
. Motion Picture Daily,  June , Clippings File/AMPAS.
. Variety,  September , Clippings File/AMPAS.
. Kinematograph Weekly,  June , p. .
. Observer,  June , BFI Microfiche.
. Monthly Film Bulletin, June , p. ; Daily Telegraph,  June , BFI
Microfiche.
. Sunday Times,  June , Clippings File, BFI.
. Time,  September , p. .
. Lorentz’s review was originally published in the September  issue of
McCall’s. It is reprinted in P. Lorentz, Lorentz on Film: Movies, –, New
York, , pp. –.
. New York Times,  September , p. .
. New Statesman,  July , Clippings File, BFI.
. A. Cooke, ‘Films of the Quarter’, Sight and Sound, vol. , no. , , p. .
. Greene’s statements are not offered within a conventional review of The 
Steps, but are stated within a more contemplative piece on British and American
cinema. The article, from a March  issue of the Fortnightly Review, is
reprinted in Parkinson (ed.), Mornings in the Dark, pp. –.
. Daily Telegraph,  June ; BFI Microfiche.
. Monthly Film Bulletin, June , p. .
. Ferguson’s views on The  Steps were expressed in a review of The Secret
Agent which chastised Hitchcock for once again making an espionage thriller.
The review originally appeared in the  June  issue of the New Republic,
and it is reprinted in Kaufmann with Hensell (eds), American Film Criticism,
p. .
. Parkinson (ed.), Mornings in the Dark, pp. –.
. Truffaut, Hitchcock, pp. –.
. One suspects that it was very difficult to write such histories when authors had
to rely largely on memory rather than repeated viewings on video. (Jacobs,
The Rise of the American Film, p. .)
. See, for example, Knight, The Liveliest Art, pp. –; and Mast, A Short History
of the Movies, p. .
. In , the documentary filmmaker John Grierson had also admired Hitchcock
as ‘the sharpest observer and finest master of detail in all England’, but Grierson
NOTES 115

regretted Hitchcock’s penchant for melodrama and suspense and dubbed him
‘the world’s best director of unimportant pictures’. See the review of Murder!
in Hardy (ed.), Grierson on the Movies, p. .
. Anderson, ‘Alfred Hitchcock’, p. .
. Ibid., p. .
. Kapsis discusses reviews of The Man Who Knew Too Much that appeared in the
Nation, the New Yorker and the Saturday Review. Kapsis, Hitchcock, pp. –.
. Kauffman’s review appeared in the  August  issue of New Republic. It is
reprinted in Naremore (ed.), North by Northwest, p. .
. When a new edition of Hitchcock’s Films was published in , Wood expressed
regret for his dismissal of the British films and offered new chapters devoted
to the British films, including one on The  Steps. For the original comments
see Wood, Hitchcock’s Films Revisited, p. .
. Rohmer and Chabrol, Hitchcock, pp. –.
. Bogdanovich considered Hitchcock to be Britain’s ‘only director worth talking
about seriously; their lone contribution to the art’, but the British films were
still inferior to the director’s American films. Only ‘nostalgia’ could explain a
preference for the British films. Truffaut famously declared (to Hitchcock) that
there is a certain incompatability between the terms ‘cinema’ and ‘Britain’. (See
Bogdanovich, The Cinema of Alfred Hitchcock, pp. –; and Truffaut, Hitchcock,
p. .)
. Taylor, Hitch, p. .
. Harper, Women in British Cinema, p. .
. Pilbeam is the star of Young and Innocent while Lockwood stars in The Lady
Vanishes. Harper, ‘From Wholesome Girls to Difficult Dowagers’, p. .
. Taylor, Hitch, p. ; Spoto, The Dark Side of Genius, p. .
. Rothman, The Murderous Gaze, pp. –.
. Durgnat, The Strange Case of Alfred Hitchcock, pp. –.
. C. Barr, English Hitchcock, p. .
. The stage version also uses the numerical title and the graphics from the original
film. The production was still touring in . Simon Williams was starring as
Hannay in that year and director was Richard Baron. The adaptation of the
story is credited to Simon Corble and Nobby Dimon.
. There are two letters from Angus MacPhail in Hitchcock’s collected papers
that concern remaking The  Steps. MacPhail was clearly more enthusiastic
about the proposal and had the idea that the plot could be set in motion when
Hannay overhears a spy’s conversation in the whispering gallery of St Paul’s
Cathedral. (See Angus MacPhail to Alfred Hitchcock,  September ; and
MacPhail to Hitchcock,  September  Folder , AHC/AMPAS.)
. A letter from Sidney Bernstein informs Hitchcock that Rank owned the screen
rights to The Thirty-Nine Steps until . (See Sidney Bernstein to Alfred
Hitchcock,  February ; Folder , AHC/AMPAS.)
. When Hannay is chased by a plane over the moors, the scene owes more to
North by Northwest than to Buchan, and so too does the staging of Scudder’s
THE 39 STEPS 116

murder. The climax at the top of Big Ben, meanwhile, may be derived from the
plans for the  film. But it is also a pastiche of Harold Lloyd (Safety Last,
), Will Hay (My Learned Friend, ) and nearly every public climax in
the Hitchcock–Bennett films (from Blackmail to Saboteur).
. Camp, ‘John Buchan and Alfred Hitchcock’, p. .
. Truffaut, Hitchcock, p. .
 Sources

ARTICLES

Anderson, L., ‘Alfred Hitchcock’, Sequence, vol. , .

Barr, C., ‘Hitchcock’s British Films Revisited’, in A. Higson (ed.), Dissolving Views:
Key Writings on British Cinema (London, ).
Belton, J., ‘Charles Bennett and the Typical Hitchcock Scenario’, Film History,
vol. , no. , .
Bergfelder, T., ‘Surface and Distraction: Style and Genre at Gainsborough in the
Late s and s’, in P. Cook (ed.), Gainsborough Pictures (London, ).
Camp, J., ‘John Buchan and Alfred Hitchcock’, Literature and Film Quarterly, vol. ,
.
Ferrera, P., ‘The Discontented Bourgeois: Bourgeois Morality and the Interplay of
Light and Dark Strains in Hitchcock’s Films’, New Orleans Review, Winter .
Harper, S., ‘From Wholesome Girls to Difficult Dowagers: Actresses in s
British Cinema’, in J. Ashby and A. Higson (eds), British Cinema: Past and
Present (London, ).
Lovell, A., ‘Interview: Ivor Montagu’, Screen, vol. , no. , .
MacArthur, C., ‘The Critics Who Knew Too Much: Hitchcock and the Absent
Class Paradigm’, Film Studies: An International Review, no. , Spring .
McDougall, S. Y., ‘Mirth, Sexuality and Suspense: Alfred Hitchcock’s Adaptation
of The Thirty-Nine Steps’, Literature and Film Quarterly, vol. , .
Montagu, I., ‘Working with Hitchcock’, Sight and Sound, vol. , no. , Summer
.
Ryall, T., ‘One Hundred and Seventeen Steps Toward Masculinity’, in P. Kirkham
and J. Thumin (eds), You Tarzan: Masculinity, Movies and Men (London, ).
Schaber, B., ‘Hitler Can’t Keep ’Em That Long’, in S. Cohan and I. R. Hark (eds),
The Road Movie Book (London, ).
Smith, J. M., ‘Conservative Individualism: A Selection of English Hitchcock’,
Screen, vol. , no. , Autumn .
Werndorff, O. F., ‘Art Direction’, in C. Winchester (ed.), The World Film Encyclo-
pedia (London, ).
THE 39 STEPS 118

BOOKS

Auiler, D., Hitchcock’s Secret Notebooks (London, ).

Balcon, M., Michael Balcon Presents … A Lifetime of Films (London, ).
Barr, C., English Hitchcock (Moffat, Scotland, ).
Barrow, K., Mr Chips: The Life of Robert Donat (London, ).
Behlmer, R., Memo from David O. Selznick (Hollywood,  []).
Bogdanovich, P., The Cinema of Alfred Hitchcock (New York, ).
Buchan, J., The Thirty-Nine Steps (London,  []).
–– Greenmantle (London,  []).
–– The Three Hostages (Oxford,  []).
–– Memory Hold-the-Door (London, ).
Buchan, W., John Buchan: A Memoir (London, ).
Deutelbaum, M. and L. Poague, A Hitchcock Reader (Ames, IA, ).
Durgnat, R., The Strange Case of Alfred Hitchcock (London, ).
Gottlieb, S. (ed.), Hitchcock on Hitchcock: Selected Writings and Interviews (London,
 []).
Hardy, F. (ed.), Grierson on the Movies (London, ).
Harper, S., Women in British Cinema: Mad, Bad and Dangerous to Know (London,
).
Haskell, M., From Reverence to Rape: The Treatment of Women in the Movies
(Chicago,  []).
Jacobs, L., The Rise of the American Film (New York, ).
Kapsis, R., Hitchcock: The Making of a Reputation (Chicago, ).
Kaufman, S. with B. Hensell (eds), American Film Criticism: From the Beginnings to
Citizen Kane (Westport, CT, ).
Knight, A., The Liveliest Art: A Panoramic History of the Movies (New York, ).
Landy, M., British Genres: Cinema and Society, – (Princeton, ).
LaValley, A. (ed.), Focus on Hitchcock (Englewood Cliffs, NJ, ).
Levy, L., Music for the Movies (London, ).
Lorentz, P., Lorentz on Film: Movies, – (New York, ).
Low, R., Film Making in s Britain (London, ).
Lownie, A., John Buchan: The Presbyterian Cavalier (London, ).
McGilligan, P. (ed.), Backstory : Interviews with Screenwriters of Hollywood’s Golden
Age (Berkeley, ).
Mast, G., A Short History of the Movies (Indianapolis, ).
Modleski, T., The Women Who Knew Too Much: Hitchcock and Feminist Theory
(London, ).
Naremore, J. (ed.), North by Northwest (New Jersey, ).
Parkinson, D. (ed.), Mornings in the Dark: The Graham Greene Film Reader (London,
).
SOURCES 119

Phillips, G. D., Alfred Hitchcock (Bromley, Kent,  []).

Richards, J., Visions of Yesterday (London, ).
–– The Age of the Dream Palace: Cinema and Society in Britain, – (London,
).
–– (ed.) The Unknown s: An Alternative History of the British Cinema, –
 (London, ).
Robertson, J., The British Board of Film Censors: Film Censorship in Britain, –
 (London, ).
Rohmer, E. and C. Chabrol, Hitchcock: The First Forty-Four Films (Oxford, 
[]).
Rothman, W., Hitchcock: The Murderous Gaze (Cambridge, MA, ).
Ryall, T., Alfred Hitchcock and the British Cinema (London, ).
Sarris, A., “You Ain’t Heard Nothin’ Yet”: The American Talking Film, History and
Memory, – (Oxford, ).
Sedgwick, J., Popular Filmgoing in s Britain: A Choice of Pleasures (Exeter,
).
Short, K. R. M., Screening the Propaganda of British Air Power: From RAF ()
to The Lion Has Wings () (Trowbridge, England, ).
Smith, J. A., John Buchan: A Biography (Oxford, ).
Spoto, D., The Art of Alfred Hitchcock: Fifty Years of His Motion Pictures (New
York,  []).
–– The Dark Side of Genius: The Life of Alfred Hitchcock (New York,  []).
Taylor, J. R., Hitch: The Authorised Biography of Alfred Hitchcock (London, 
[]).
C.T. [Charles Tennyson], Penrose Tennyson (London, ).
Thomson, D., Showman: The Life of David O. Selznick (New York, ).
Truffaut, F. with H. G. Scott, Hitchcock: The Definitive Study (London,  []).
Usborne, R., Clubland Heroes: A Nostalgic Study of Some Recurrent Characters in the
Romantic Fiction of Dornford Yates, John Buchan and Sapper (London, ).
Wood, R., Hitchcock’s Films Revisited (London,  []).
Yacower, M., Hitchcock’s British Films (Hamden, CT, ).