1935 Directed by Alfred Hitchcock
Richard Hannay stumbles upon a conspiracy that thrusts him into a hectic chase across the Scottish moors—a chase in which he is both the pursuer and the pursued—as well as into an unexpected romance with the cool Pamela.
Les 39 marches, I 39 scalini, Il Club dei Trentanove, I trentanove scalini, 39 escalones, L'homme au doigt coupé, Os 39 Degraus, 39 Degraus, 39 Stufen, The Thirty-Nine Steps, Тридцять дев'ять сходинок
It's amazing how a movie almost 80 years holds the viewer and here we see all that consecrated Hitchcock, as the great mix of drama and humor, beyond the old thriller that holds the guy to the end. Robert Donat razes in the role of Richard Hannay, the speech scene is fantastic.
Step 1: Turn on your typewriter
Step 2: Think of a really cool title for a movie
Step 3: Name your movie that title
Step 4: Write your script
Step 5: Make sure to give your characters lots of depth and cool names
Step 6: Finish the first draft of your script
Step 7: Take it to your friend to look over for edits
Step 8: Throw things at your friend when they say the movie is bad
Step 9: Realize your friend was right and apologize
Step 10: Arduous editing to make your shitty script good
Step 11: After months of hard work you finally have a good script
Step 12: Go to Alfred Hitchcock's house
Step 13: Sneak…
“I used to wake up in the middle of the night screaming, thinking the police were after me. But one gets hardened.”
A near-perfect snapdoodle of creamy greys and point collars, the kind of film where the star looks better poaching a haddock than you’ll ever look in a lifetime of your best moments. Hitchcock here seems a vanguardist of modern surveillance delirium, of innermost paranoia gone public—cops at train stations, cops crawling the Highlands, cops, cops, cops (and a comic menace of an autogyro.) Filmmakers have ripped it off for 80 years, whether they know it or not, but they usually get the hymn’s words but not its music: the piss-taking of God and politics, the whirl of push-pulls…
Brilliantly applying the twists & turns to build up its suspense while also supporting the entire narrative with its clever use of humour in order to keep the whole film a light-hearted cinematic experience, The 39 Steps is an earlier gem in the career of a filmmaker who later went on to become, arguably, the greatest director of all time.
Directed by Alfred Hitchcock, this motion picture tells the story of a man in London who tries to help a counterespionage agent prevent the stealing of top secret information from an organisation of spies but when the agent is killed & he is framed for the murder, he goes on the run to expose the spy ring & prove his innocence in the…
Continuing my plough through all of Alfred Hitchcock's talkie era films with The 39 Steps. What a difference a couple of years make, eh Alfred?
From nondescript director of plodding melodramas to the most exciting director in British cinema in the course of three films. Having created a fair amount of buzz for the fun The Man Who Knew Too Much, The 39 Steps saw Alfred Hitchcock create his first true masterpiece and a film that is still one of the most exciting and entertaining adventure thrillers that you could ever ask to see.
A wonderful Robert Donat finds himself on the run after a mysterious woman approaches him after a show and asks him to help her escape some…
Feels like a proof of concept for "North by Northwest", and it's pretty damn good.
Auch wenn The 39 Steps Gefahr läuft an einigen Stellen zu überladen zu wirken oder zu vieles in zu wenig Zeit erzählen zu wollen, handelt es sich bei diesem frühen Hitchcock um einen tollen, zeitlosen Film, der viele spannende Versatzstücke verwendet, die auch heute noch zum Standard des Krimi- und Thrillerkinos gehören.
2019: The Pieper Review -- Film #369 (7/18/2019)
My only experience watching The 39 Steps had been through a shoddily transferred Hitchcock 20-pack I received as a gift back in high school. I remember enjoying it well enough despite the poor quality, but I had no idea just how many of the shots would stick in my memory! Clearly, this is a testament to the excellent cinematography (Bernard Knowles) and Hitch's own budding directorial prowess. That said, the true MVP award belongs to its star. Robert Donat is wonderful as the prototypical Hitchcockian "wrong man." He oozes charm and is able to carry this film through all of its insane picaresque flourishes. Tons of fun, lots of laughs, and a great blueprint for his later masterwork, North by Northwest.
이 작품이 2단계 정도 진화하면 <북북서로 진로를 돌려라>가 될 듯하다. 스파이물이지만 뭔가 어색하다. 하지만 미워할 수 없다. 마지막에 우연과 떡밥을 회수해주는 능력은 재미있다. 중간에는 스파이물의 긴장은 없지만, 나름 스크류볼 코미디의 느낌을 줄려고 노력한 건가? 1935년인데 저 편집이나 연출은 뭔가 부족해도 히치콕이다라는 생각을 준다.
None of the staircases in this movie had anywhere near 39 steps in them; misleading title
the best film by some margin in my hitchcock run-through so far. easy to see the template for the modern spy/thriller movies that it has set. the scene where robert donat is introduced as the speaker at a political meeting is genuinely hilarious.
Obviously a Hitchcock classic. And Richard Hannay (Robert Donat) was a very handsome chap. However, i thought the ending was a bit of an anticlimax. Maybe i missed something.
Early Hitchcock, and it’s a belter, an excellent conspiracy thriller, with a man wrongly accused of murder and on the run (conjuring up memories of the later ‘North By Northwest’), sharing snappy banter along the way, and finding ingenious ways to get out of scrapes. The dialogue with the murdered spy is initially a bit wooden, but it all improves as it goes along, and Robert Donat shares that easy charm that Cary Grant and Jimmy Stewart have in Hitchcock’s later films.
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