The 39 Steps (1935)

Film: The 39 Steps (1935)

Stars: Robert Donat, Madeleine Carroll, Lucie Mannheim, Godfrey Tearle, Peggy Ashcroft, Wylie Watson

Director: Alfred Hitchcock

Oscar History: No nominations

Snap Judgment Ranking: 4/5 stars

Each month, as part of our 2021 Saturdays with the Stars series, we highlight a different one Alfred Hitchcock's Leading Ladies.  This month, our focus is on Madeleine Carroll-click here to learn more about Ms. Carroll (and why I picked her), and click here for other Saturdays with the Stars articles.

In writing up the Saturdays with the Stars series over the past two years, we get a lot of deep cut films.  We've had movies that I'd never heard of, not even in a footnote or a "virtually unknown" way...just movies that I never knew existed until this series.  And then there are times where I sheepishly have to confide that I haven't seen a bonafide classic, and that's where we are today.  Madeleine Carroll's career was filled with an enormous number of hits, made with some of the most important leading men & directors of the 1930's, but when it comes down to it, her story is really about The 39 Steps.  While movies like Vertigo and Psycho are the first go-to's for the director, The 39 Steps is chronologically the first movie of his that pretty much everyone involved has universally-praised as a masterpiece, and is the most important film of Madeleine Carroll's life.  Nearly 90 years after the film came out, it's worth confessing-it's also still really good.

(Spoilers Ahead) The movie's plot is complex, even for Hitchcock, but I'll get through it so we have some grounding before we get to the actual quality of the movie.  The film is about Richard Hannay (Donat), an ordinary man who witnesses a man who can recall anything at a side show called Mr. Memory (Watson).  Shots are fired in the theater, and on his way out Hannay meets Annabella Smith (Mannheim) whom he convinces to come back to his apartment, and there she says she's a spy, and is trying to protect British intelligence, alluding to the enigmatic "39 Steps."  After she is found dead the next day, the police assume Hannay to be the murderer, and he becomes a fugitive to prove his innocence.  Along the way he meets Pamela (Carroll), a beautiful woman whom he becomes handcuffed to at one point, and who doesn't trust him, but because they're thrown together they have to work together to prove what the 39 Steps is, as both are in real danger if its secret is not discovered.

The movie is good up until the last moments, when it becomes truly great.  The film is prototypical Hitchcock in the ways that it takes an ordinary man (Donat here, but you see shades of later leading men like Jimmy Stewart & Cary Grant in his work), puts him in an extraordinary situation, and sees how he handles it.  But the climactic scene is shocking & delicious.  Hannay suddenly realizes that the code is hidden not on paper, but instead Mr. Memory himself has memorized them & will be used to smuggle the secrets out of the country.  He confronts him onstage, thus spoiling the men's plans, with Mr. Memory dying as he compulsively tells the men his secrets.  It's a brilliantly-constructed thriller move, one with a great "aha" moment (I'll admit-I hadn't figure out this was where the story was headed even though it's obvious in retrospect), and literally I got goosebumps.  Honestly, the only real complaint I had about the movie is that it was too rushed-Hitch a few years later would've been able to add more tension to the story, and made the remainder of the pacing worthy of his magnificent climax.

Madeleine Carroll is fun, if perhaps slightly wrong for the tone of the film.  There are moments in the middle of the movie where it almost feels like we're watching It Happened One Night with rich banter between Donat & Carroll, but it takes you out of the picture as it feels tonally wrong.  The two have great chemistry, though, and she looks like a Hitchcock leading lady.  This movie made her a star, though not without some caveats.  This year with Hitchcock we take the good with the bad, but we don't hide the latter, and the director, notorious for putting his leading ladies through the ringer, at one point literally handcuffed Donat & Carroll together (lying about whether or not he still had the key) so that they could understand better what their characters went through.  As a result, you can actually see real welts on Carroll's wrists in the film that weren't makeup-that was a result of Hitchcock's "prank."  This wasn't enough, though, to make Carroll not work with him again, and next week we'll take a look at their second pairing.