The 39 Steps: A British Film Guide 9780755604609, 9781860646140

Citation preview

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

. 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 coldblooded 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.

vii

         

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 interesting 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 Academy 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 Distributors Director Screenplay

Photography Art Director Editor Recordist Wardrobe Dress Designer Musical Director (uncredited) Producer Associate Producer Length Running Time UK Première US Première

Gaumont-British Pictures Gaumont-British Distributors Ltd. Alfred Hitchcock Charles Bennett (adaptation) Alma Reville (continuity) Ian Hay (dialogue) (based on the book by John Buchan) Bernard Knowles O. Werndorff D. N. Twist A. Birch Marianne J. Strassner Louis Levy Michael Balcon Ivor Montagu , feet  minutes  June   August  CAST

Robert Donat Madeleine Carroll Lucie Mannheim Godfrey Tearle Peggy Ashcroft Helen Haye John Laurie Frank Cellier Wylie Watson Peggy Simpson

Richard Hannay Pamela Miss Smith Professor Jordan Crofter’s Wife Mrs Jordan Crofter The Sheriff Mr Memory Maid

2

THE 39 STEPS

Jerry Verno Gus McNaughton (uncredited) Frederick Piper John Turnbull Ivor Barnard Matthew Boulton S. J. Warmington Vida Hope Miles Malleson

Commercial Traveller Commercial Traveller Milkman Police Inspector Chairman of Political Meeting Fake Police Officer Detective Usherette 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 conspiracy 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 Hammersmith. 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 encourage 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 thirtynine. 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 understanding 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 understood 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 recognizable 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 ‘understatement 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 wellknown 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 Standfast (), 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 administrator 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 running 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 information 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 thirtyseven 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 masculinity. 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 neighbour, 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 capacity 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 wellknown 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 probabilities. 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 immediate 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 GaumontBritish, 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, identification 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 Northwest. 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 ThirtyNine 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 purposelessness, 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 disillusionment. 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 September  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 venality. 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 beginning 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 fantastic 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-enscène, 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 community 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 ‘quotaquickies’ 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 collaborators. 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-yearold 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 producer 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 comparatively 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 Germany. 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 storytelling 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 primarily 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 Hitchcock 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. Hitchcock’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 Drummond’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 following 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 GaumontBritish 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 expertise 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 GaumontBritish’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 contemporary 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 intrigue; 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 entertainment’. 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 elaborated 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

27

PRODUCTION CONTEXT

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 onstage 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 comedies, 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 foothold 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 increases 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 furlined 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 envisaged 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

. 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)

33

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 collaborators’.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 Werndorff, the musical director Louis Levy also remembered his collaboration with Hitchcock as close and creative:

36

THE 39 STEPS

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 improvisation.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 appearance 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 throughout 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 Highlands 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, incorporating 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

41

THE 39 STEPS

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 storyboards 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 appropriate, 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 sympathetic. 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 Hitchcock’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 audience 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 ‘prodigious 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 heavyweight 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! Gentleman, 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

45

THE 39 STEPS

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 residents’ 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 thirtynine 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 closeup 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 contrick 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 purpose 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 continues 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-naShellach 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

50

THE 39 STEPS

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 commentaries 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 compartment, 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.

56

THE 39 STEPS

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 newspaper 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 Margaret’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 closeup 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

59

THE 39 STEPS

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 searchlight 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 closeup, 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-naShellach. (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 overwhelmed 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 resemblance 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 nonchalantly, 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

63

THE 39 STEPS

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, laughing 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

64

THE 39 STEPS

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

66

THE 39 STEPS

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 gathering 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 coldblooded 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 ,

68

THE 39 STEPS

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 ridiculous 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 relationship 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 atmosphere 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 sandwich 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 rapprochement 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 impatience, 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

72

THE 39 STEPS

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 documents 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 entertainment’ 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 organization 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 apprehended 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 background, 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.

76

THE 39 STEPS

. 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 declaration 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 together, 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 housemaid 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 handsome 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. GaumontBritish 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 considered 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 newspapers 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 pretending 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 boxoffice 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

86

THE 39 STEPS

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 example, 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 marketing 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 combination 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 particularly 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 reviews 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’ boxoffice 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 Hitchcock’) 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

90

THE 39 STEPS

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 newspaper 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 exceptional 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 prejudiced 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. Lejeune offered a particularly perceptive review in the Observer, in which she noted influences upon the film as well as its own specific achievements: 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 proclaimed 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 scenarists 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 charwoman’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 observational 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 Hitchcock’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

94

THE 39 STEPS

SUBSEQUENT CRITICAL VIEWS

While The  Steps was considered to be a very well made and entertaining 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 lowermiddle-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 commercial 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 happenings 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 shortcomings 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 VistaVision, 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 Kauffman 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 Hitchcock 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 Hitchcock’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, Bogdanovich 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 picaresque structure; the notion that the object of pursuit is not important (the ‘MacGuffin’); the suspicious romance; the suave villain; the unsympathetic 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 biographer (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 unconcerned 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 imagination 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 Hitchcock 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 influence 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 ownership 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 Hitchcockian 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, meanwhile, 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 Wonderful 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 ‘understatement 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 ‘international’ films. Among the many notable films produced under his supervision were the Ealing comedies. Charles Bennett (–) went to Hollywood in . He collaborated 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 expansive 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.], Hitchcock 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, Hitchcock, 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, ‘Interview: 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.), Backstory , 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,

111

NOTES

. .

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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’, Kinematograph 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

112

THE 39 STEPS

.

. . . . . . .

.

walking with Hitchcock. See Belton, ‘Charles Bennett and the Typical Hitchcock 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 Hollywood (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 Encyclopedia (London, ).

118

THE 39 STEPS

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, ).