The 39 Steps: Alfred Hitchcock’s Fun, Flighty Trial Run of North By Northwest

By Trace Sauveur  |  November 13, 2023 | 2:30pm
Movies Features Alfred Hitchcock
The 39 Steps: Alfred Hitchcock’s Fun, Flighty Trial Run of North By Northwest
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North By Northwest, Alfred Hitchcock’s 1959 film about an everyday marketing executive (Cary Grant’s Roger Thornhill) embroiled in an international manhunt by foreign spies after an unfortunate case of mistaken identity, is often noted as being heavily influential on the modern action film. It’s tough to argue against, as Hitchcock’s setpiece-forward approach to the film, favoring big moments and clever character banter over intricate plotting or symbolism, would predict many contemporary crowd-pleasing spectacles. The Master of Suspense ended up with a progenitor of the upbeat, globetrotting blockbuster.

However, it doesn’t take too thorough an investigation of his prior catalog to see that he was always building toward a film like North By Northwest. His oeuvre is one full of spy pictures, particularly ones where someone finds themselves in the wrong place at the wrong time, or is thrust into the world of international espionage after they are mistaken for someone they’re not (apt for a director with a film literally called The Wrong Man). The Man Who Knew Too Much, Secret Agent, Foreign Correspondent and Saboteur all intersect with these particular conventions of Hitchcock’s films in one way or another. But the one that feels most in tune with the spirit of North by Northwest and, indeed, makes for an even earlier predecessor of the types of blockbusters seen today is his British-made film The 39 Steps.

As a story about an average man on the run after accidentally being exposed to the taciturn world of undercover agents, The 39 Steps is a familiar, winking piece of pulp from a director who thrived when throwing his audience off-track as much as he did when purely entertaining them. And yes, it’s hard for it not to feel like a dry run of the film that would later be known as one of his masterpieces. 

Unlike Thornhill, whom a group of foreign agents pursues after he’s erroneously identified as an opposing spy, The 39 Steps follows Richard Hannay (Robert Donat), a man in London on business who is fleeing the law after being wrongly accused of a murder in his flat. The murdered woman, Annabella Smith (Lucie Mannheim), was an undercover agent whose death actually lies at the hands of operatives from the mysterious 39 Steps spy organization. Having shared intel with Hannay that the men she’s looking for are located in the Scottish highlands, Hannay flees north in order to uncover the outfit and clear his name, experiencing close encounters with both the police and dangerous foreign agents in the process. 

Just as North by Northwest was steeped in Cold War paranoia, The 39 Steps is indebted to similar notions of political fears and invading foreign presences. Fitting, as John Buchan’s novel of the same name, on which the film is based, was written at the outset of World War I and deals with the fears of intelligence agents in England and Scotland.  

Yet both films also prioritize a gradually escalating sense of adventure, intrigue and fun. In particular, The 39 Steps sees Hitchcock in pulp mode, where his tight, controlled framing and gift for crafting sequences of mounting tension meets a freewheeling sense of episodic incident in which a dopey, ill-equipped guy finds himself flying by the seat of his pants as he tries to outrun the parties closing in on him, all while encasing himself further into a world of peril. Though loosely based on Buchan’s novel, the film deviates from the plot significantly, likely because Hitchcock saw a story he could imbue with his particular flair for impish thrills. 

Also like North By Northwest, The 39 Steps’ idea of a globetrotting adventure is limited to a single country. Still, the adventurous capers are infectious as we move from the nightlife of London to the rural moors of Scotland and back again. The 39 Steps is fueled by the conspiracy of words and double-crossings through and through, yet still feels evocative of the blockbuster heroes and feats that we see in cinemas today. 

In particular, Hannay feels like a man who is forced into an Ethan Hunt role—and hilariously so. Much like Hunt in the first Mission: Impossible, he has to maneuver his way through a world of deception and suspicion while working to clear his name of wrongdoing. The only difference is that Hannay is not a trained spy, which leads to comic sequences such as attempting to flee the authorities searching for him on a moving train by ducking into a cabin and passionately kissing the residing woman, Pamela (Madeleine Carroll), to make it look like a moment of intimacy. 

It’s a move that may have worked if done with the quick, charming acuity of Hunt or the smooth allure of James Bond. For Hannay, it ends with Pamela immediately selling him out, forcing him to escape by shimmying along the outside of the (still moving) train into another cabin, just barely avoiding the police until it comes to a stop and he’s able to properly lose his pursuers.

Despite his ineptitude, Hannay comically weasels his way out of harm’s way either through serendipitous ingenuity or just sheer luck. When he’s faced with the leader of The 39 Steps, Professor Jordan (Godfrey Tearle), he’s instantly shot in the chest, only for the revelation (one of Hitchcock’s clumsier ones, admittedly) that he had a hymnary in the chest pocket of the coat he took from a couple that let him hide in their home. When he goes to the local police to inform them that Jordan is a foreign agent, the authorities dismiss his story and catch onto his identity as a wanted suspect for murder. He escapes by hiding among the panel at a local political rally. The only trouble is that he’s mistaken for the day’s guest speaker, and he’s forced up to the stand to try his best at kindling the passions of the crowd as a distraction, a feat he manages to pull off. 

These absurd episodes, where Hitchcock waggishly plays with a concoction of genres, are capped by The 39 Steps’ ultimate destination: Placing Hannay in a high-concept rom-com premise, handcuffed to Pamela after she once again attempts to thwart his escapades. It’s an extended sequence of pop movie fun, one paralleled as recently as this year’s Mission: Impossible—Dead Reckoning Part One. Pamela falling for Hannay after having a chance at escape (then a realization that he’s telling the truth about The 39 Steps) feels sudden, but also like an inevitable endpoint to how Hitchcock is flexing his capabilities across the obligatory tenets of multiple genres. It helps that Donat and Carroll so easily portray the playful back-and-forth between the characters, effortlessly selling their quick turn from adversaries to lovers; the film closes with them locking hands after taking down Jordan. 

The eventual love between the endangered protagonist and the woman seemingly set against him is another element revisited in North by Northwest and, yes, Carroll is an early instance of Hitchcock’s propensity for blonde women pivotal to the plot, though her characterization is a bit looser than the “Hitchcock Blonde” persona that would later develop throughout his films. It’s that same looseness that gives The 39 Steps its sense of untethered pleasure. 

That same idea of pure entertainment is the most prominent aspect shared between this film and North by Northwest, which attempted to avoid some of the darker themes and complex psychological ideas of other Hitchcock films. In his extended interview series with director and peer François Truffaut, the pair lament the reception of The 39 Steps and North by Northwest by critics who believed that Hitchcock’s cheeky mode of thrills was unintentional. When asked about sacrificing notions of plausibility in his films, Hitchcock says, “If you want to analyze everything in terms of plausibility then you end up doing a documentary,” and, “A critic who talks to me about ‘plausibility’ is a dull fellow.” 

The basis of these two films seems to follow this ethos as a strict guiding principle. In rebuke to reviews of North by Northwest that claimed he was participating in an unintentional parody of himself, he says, “I was aware when I was doing North by Northwest that I had a big tongue in my cheek all the way.” Aside from similarities in plot, Hitchcock’s facetious mischief is the spiritual link between The 39 Steps and its more famous descendant. 

Ironically enough, North by Northwest screenwriter Ernest Lehman claimed that, despite the similarities between the films, he had totally forgotten about The 39 Steps until after he had finished his script. It speaks to the timeless appeal of the film’s crowd-pleasing capers, the DNA of which continues to permeate the public consciousness. Hitchcock seemed to realize the lasting draw of the film himself, and there’s something thrilling about his decision to return to the pulpy intrigue of his early British work right in the middle of making his most intricate masterpieces (North By Northwest was released the year after Vertigo and the year before Psycho). It further cements the range of his interests and the breadth of his talents: Hitchcock may be the Master of Suspense, but he’s just as much a master of pop spectacle.

Trace Sauveur is a writer based in Austin, TX, where he primarily contributes to The Austin Chronicle. He loves David Lynch, John Carpenter, the Fast & Furious movies, and all the same bands he listened to in high school. He is @tracesauveur on Twitter where you can allow his thoughts to contaminate your feed.

 
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