Director: Alfred Hitchcock
Writers: Charles Bennett,
Ian Hay, John Buchan (novel)
Starring: Robert Donat,
Madeleine Carroll, Lucie Mannheim, Godfrey Tearle, Peggy Ashcroft, John Laurie,
Helen Haye, Frank Cellier, Wylie Watson
Alfred Hitchcock’s “The 39
Steps” plays as a movie trying to break out of the constraints of its times. It
is an example of how Hitchcock needed the power and scope of Hollywood to jump
the cinematic art forward in just the way he did after his marriage with Tinsletown.
It is a movie that bursts at its cinematic seams for greater production value
and a leap forward in storytelling for the format.
As is often the case with
Hitch, he unsettles his audience with his opening images. A man buys a ticket
at a box office and the next few shots are those of feet. Even the purchase of
the ticket fails to show us a face or even a torso of the man we are following
into a theater. Without seeing any faces and with a sequence of feet walking this
way and that, we are immediately placed into the mindset of a sort of chase
going on. And yet, we have no notion of who is being chased, or why, or who is
doing the chasing. The inside of the theater is a scene of a degree of chaos.
The camera finally gives us
the face of a man we can only assume is our hero. Of course, we first see him
from the back, giving us some doubt as to his trustworthiness. This is Jack. It
is assumed this scene will be about him, but it is not. He watches a man who
claims to know any piece of information. After a series of difficult questions
the man answers with little hesitation, someone holds a gun up in the crowd and
fires it into the air. The result is what we were always told would happen if
you yelled, “Fire!” in a crowded theater.
Jack is thrust into one of
Hitch’s favorite plots, the man wrongfully associated with some sort of
criminal activity. He helps a woman escape the riotous theater and takes her to
his apartment. She behaves as a paranoid, but like they say, just because
you’re paranoid doesn’t mean they aren’t after you. She asks Jack if he’s heard
of the 39 Steps, lays a line on him about being chased because she knows
important secrets pertaining to national security, and reveals it was she who
fired the shot. Now, like any good gent in a film from the early 20th
Century, he takes all this in with surprising calm. Not impressed a bit until
she wakes him up in the middle of the night with a knife in her back.
This development gives us
another of Hitch’s favorite motifs, the misdirection of roles. As the audience
we assume from what we already know about thrillers that these two people will
share an adventure together, but then without warning he eliminates one of the
people we thought would be a lead in the story. He pulls the rug out from under
us using our own expectations, much as he did later in his career with his
masterpiece “Psycho”.
Hitch also uses an extreme
amount of depth of field in his camera for the time. His shot compositions
involve people holding conversations with one person standing very close to the
camera and others much farther away. This creates a broken focus putting the
audience into the head of the closest character. Later this type of shot would
be improved by using a split focus so both characters could be in focus in the
same shot, but Hitch’s version achieves much of the same effect even with the
closest character being out of focus.
Hitch perpetuates his
atmosphere of paranoia during a train sequence in which Jack observes two other
passengers reading newspapers that identify him as the prime suspect in the
woman’s murder. With the newspapers covering the bottom half of his screen, we
witness a series of shots of just the three characters’ eyes observing each
other over the tops of their newspapers. Jack tries to read their eyes and
can’t tell if they’ve recognized him or not when it seems they are actually
oblivious of his connection to the story.
Jack then enters into a
sequence of rendezvous’ with women he enlists for help. The first is the
Hitchcock blonde. Played by Madeleine Carroll, she will eventually become the
woman who reluctantly but ultimately helps him out of his predicament. However,
in their first encounter she betrays his presence to the authorities. I’m
particularly fond of this train sequence of the film because it reminds me of a
modern train thriller I’m sure was influenced by this classic, “The Silver
Streak”. A little later, Jack escapes the police by joining in a parade, ala
“The Fugitive”.
He also employs the help of
a farm wife as he escapes the authorities through the Scottish moors. She is
possibly caught up in the escape from her everyday life that this man of
intrigue brings into her home. She risks reprimand from her husband, suspicious
of this stranger on sight, to help him. This eventually leads to yet another
thriller cliché that hadn’t been so at that time, the bullet being stopped by a
book left in a pocket of his jacket.
Hitch also imbues much of
his story with good amount of humor. So many thrillers at that time were dirges
of fear and paranoia without any release. Hitch understands the effects of
humor in much the same way William Shakespeare did, who often utilized a clown
character in even his darkest of tragedies. Not only does the humor help to
sell the hero as someone the audience can trust, but it also serves as an
emotional break when tension is running high. This use of all of the audiences’
emotions connects them more deeply with the story at hand making for more
memorable moments and a more invested viewer.
Most notable about Hitch’s
work in even his older films are his technical innovations. Late in the film
there is an astonishing shot that goes from an interior of a car to an exterior
shot of that same car driving away on a country road. The camera follows the
action from the front seat to the back seat and out the back of the car to
watch it drive away in one apparently seamless shot. Hitch cleverly hides a
swipe edit as the back window frame of the car passes in front of the camera to
turn an interior into and exterior without appearing to break the shot. Even by
today’s standards, it’s a remarkable example of editing and framing.
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