Original subtitles

Is your name Hannay? No.

Are you coming in to tea, sir? I'll be right along!

If you ever need to make the case for Alfred Hitchcock,

there is no better answer than The 39 Steps.

The 39 Steps is not only a quintessential thriller,

but is so hugely influential,

and this idea that it's almost not only a quintessential thriller,

but a quintessential "Hollywood" for lack of a better way of putting it,

entertainment thing, where you have espionage thriller,

wrong-man story, combined with the romance,

combined with the action set pieces, combined with somebody

being thrown off a train. All of these things

come from The 39 Steps.

In fact, it invented the genre.

I think it was in the vanguard of a genre.

Robert Town said that

this kind of entertaining film,

this kind of adventurous entertainment starts here.

It's very unsentimental, isn't it? If you think a lot of the films

that were released around the time of The 39 Steps,

well, it surprises you how remarkably unsentimental it is

about Britain, about life.

It's dark. What it does, is it's the story.

That's all it cares about. It does not care about anything

other than a fast-moving,

propelling, thrilling story

that comes to a conclusion, then we're done.

We don't need to wrap anything up. We don't want a sequence

where everyone's given medals or anything. Nope. We're done.

This is it. This is the perfect story.

This sublime British thriller, released in 1935

and based on the novel by John Buchan,

tells us everything we need to know

about the imagination and obsessions of the London-born director.

There he goes!

Spread out in a line.

You see, it all starts with a baby,

we'll say, at the age of six months.

And the mother says "Boo,"

and scares the hell out of the baby, gives it the hiccups.

And then the baby giggles and there's its first moment of fear.

Later on, it's on a swing getting higher and higher

and catching its breath when it goes too high.

And so it goes. We all enjoy...

shall we say,

putting our toe in the cold water of fear.

This is the film that defined his methods and shaped his themes.

The foundation stone in one of the great cinematic careers.

It's all here. An innocent man on the run,

a cabal of enemy spies,

secret codes, landscapes,

train rides, daring escapes,

and an irrepressible blonde heroine.

The 39 Steps is probably the first

action adventure spy film.

I don't think that there has been anything quite like it before.

And of course there'd been adventure films,

there had been crisis films, all kinds of things,

but nothing quite like this had actually

appeared on screen before.

And so in a way, not only was it the first of its kind,

it actually created a genre,

a genre which, of course, has proved incredibly fruitful.

It also reminds us that there is far more to Hitchcock than thrills.

Like the hero, the film keeps shifting identity.

It could be taken as an urbane comedy

in the vein of Lubitsch or Sturgis.

It is certainly a romance,

and has been read as a parable on marriage.

But it is very much about paranoia and panic.

The way crowds can be swept up by emotion.

How civilisation is only a thin veneer across a capricious universe.

These are the deep-rooted preoccupations

of the genius known as Hitch.

Darling, how lovely to see you!

There's a young man having a free meal in there.

I was desperate, I'm terribly sorry, I had to do it. Look at me.

My name is Hannay, they're after me. I swear I'm innocent.

You've got to help me. I've got to keep free for the next two days.

And to my mind, essentially...

makes both a thriller and a comedy romance,

a romcom, if you want. It's very much a romcom.

I mean, it's a screwball comedy really.

As soon as Pamela arrives, you've got this...

I mean, the device of the couple who are handcuffed together

is a... is superb and it has,

there's so many ways you can look at this.

Richard Hannay is on the run,

he ends up in her carriage... He's been accused of murder.

He's been accused of murder. The police are coming down the train.

He bursts into a carriage, sees Pamela there,

kisses her, and then... just like to cover up.

And the police come by and as soon as the police come by,

Pamela has no interest in covering for him,

"This is the man you're after." So there's this clamber up

and clamber over the Forth Bridge, and then purely by chance,

he bumps into her again later on,

where he's handcuffed to her because the people who have taken them

are not the police, they're the villains pretending to be police.

And he's trying to persuade her "Look, I'm innocent and

the people who are after us are not police, they are going to kill us."

And she doesn't want any part of this.

So they've got to go across bogs

and they have to work together to get over obstacles,

when they have two completely different interests, which is

he wants to prove he's innocent and she wants to get him arrested.

And they are stuck together.

A debonair Robert Donat stars

as the unfortunate but capable Richard Hannay,

who discovers the dead body of a spy in his apartment.

Fleeing to the Highlands in search of MacGuffin known as The 39 Steps,

he will unearth a network of spies on home soil.

At his side is the feisty, mistrusting Pamela,

played by a fabulous Madeleine Carroll,

who only sticks by him largely because

they end up handcuffed together.

First and foremost, The 39 Steps is an espionage thriller.

But it's also, you know, sort of, it contains many other elements.

I think in today's parlance, we might say it was sort of

something that had a little bit for everyone.

And it's sort of one of the first films to do that, in many ways.

It's certainly one of the kind of great early models of a film

which is also a film with action set pieces,

a film with a real dark element,

and moments of the film which are quite meditative

and sort of psychologically naughty.

And also, there's a real kind of...

I wouldn't go so far as to say farcical,

but a kind of light comic element to it as well.

Because the situations that Hannay finds himself in

are increasingly very absurd.

Hitchcock's not particularly known for sort of romantic films,

and yet that is unfair because there is a...

there is a deep romance in this film,

but it's a kind of reverse to what you expect.

I think it's Truffaut said of Hitchcock

that he shoots his romantic scenes like murder scenes,

and his murder scenes like romantic scenes.

And there's a certain amount of truth in that.

In this, you've got two people who are thrown together,

who dislike each other,

who are in a situation of enforced intimacy,

especially when they're actually handcuffed together on the run,

and off they go on this adventure.

She is dragged through the mud, dragged through all over the place.

It's almost like a trial by ordeal.

And having to go through this trial by ordeal,

gives Pamela, played by Madeleine Carroll,

rather brilliantly I have to say,

the opportunity to see the truth behind this man

and that he isn't... first of all, he isn't a murderer,

but secondly, even if he... you know,

the fact that he's not a murderer doesn't mean to say that he's,

you know, hugely attractive, until she realises

that he is a man of principle

and that he is very brave,

and that he's reckless and that he's funny.

And various scenes,

the great thing about it also is that Hitchcock manages to do this

not just through the big scenes, not just through the sort of,

you know, running across the Highlands

and jumping out of trains and things like that,

but also in the smaller, more intimate scenes.

Here is the invention and audacity

of a supreme talent coming of age,

where sound and image, a deft cut or montage,

can stir an entire audience.

The 39 Steps was the film that convinced Hollywood

Hitchcock was a master of the game.

Sexy, charming, funny and unnerving,

it is one of his finest achievements.

Well, here we are.

May I come home with you?

What's the idea?

Well, I'd like to.

Well, it's your funeral.

Come on then, there's a bus.

Clear out, Hannay! They'll get you next.

By 1935, Hitchcock was firmly established

as one of Britain's most accomplished directors.

He was under contract at Gaumont-British,

beneath the knowing eye of producer Michael Balcon,

including The Man Who Knew Too Much,

The 39 Steps, and The Lady Vanishes,

it was an era of home-grown thrillers,

mixing the ordinary with the extraordinary.

So, at the point that Hitchcock is making The 39 Steps,

he has been working in film for ten years.

Although The 39 Steps is often talked about in a particular way

where if you were sort of less aware of him,

you would think perhaps it was the beginning of his career,

it actually is one of his most perfectly formed films

of a filmmaker who has been working consistently since the silent era.

And at this point, it's sort of...

he's just moved onto British Gaumont under Michael Balcon.

He's made his first film with Michael Balcon there

called The Man Who Knew Too Much, and with the same screenwriter

as well as his long-time collaborator and wife Alma Reville,

they start to work on adapting a John Buchan novel.

With his wife and son, Lord Tweedsmuir,

our new Governor General, arrives expressing good cheer.

My wife and I are looking forward

to five years of duty,

but we are also looking forward

to five years of happiness

in a land which we love

and a land where we already have so many friends.

The Scottish novelist and statesman, John Buchan,

pioneered the espionage genre,

creating its first hero in the dashing Richard Hannay.

With World War I brewing,

he imagined a genre of intrigue and flight

against a backdrop of global conflict.

Hitchcock loved what he termed

"Buchan's understatement of high dramatic ideas,"

a tone that influenced his entire career.

Tell me about the author of The 39 Steps,

John Buchan, who was he and what kind of books did he write?

John Buchan, in many ways, was his hero, Richard Hannay.

He grew up, he was the son of a church minister

and he became a lawyer and a journalist.

He was... Almost had every job going.

He was a lawyer, he was a journalist,

he worked in the Transvaal, he was in the Boer War,

and then when he came back to the UK,

he was working at a publishing house.

When the First World War broke out, he couldn't fight

so he set about writing this thriller, The 39 Steps.

And the character of Richard Hannay really has had

all of the experiences that John Buchan had had.

He, you know, describes his own life essentially.

It was one of many novels that he wrote

and it was the first one to feature the hero, Richard Hannay,

who went on through another four novels.

Certainly this was his most successful,

and it created a new kind of hero.

Buchan himself was an extraordinary character.

He'd been many things.

He was a historian, a novelist, a politician,

and he ended up as the Governor General of Canada.

But it's for The 39 Steps that he is principally remembered.

I remember reading it at school and I have to say,

it's very much a sort of Boy's Own adventure

and it created a new kind of hero,

somebody who was very British in his way,

but also had a great sort of idea

of freedom and independence,

a man who was a kind of fortune hunter,

who got involved in a spy ring.

Hitchcock had been keen to adapt

Buchan's international thriller, Greenmantle,

but the narrower focus of The 39 Steps was more practical.

Most of it could be shot in the Gaumont-British studio in Lime Grove,

with location work in Scotland.

And he warmed to the possibilities of a wrongly-accused man

who must both escape the police and foil a conspiracy.

What you were laughing at just now is true.

These men will stop at nothing.

So The 39 Steps as a novel is very much an adventure story.

It does ratchet up suspense, but it is very focused

on the kind of macho bravery

of its character, who is forced into these circumstances,

and who chooses heroism anyway.

So when Hitch returned to the novel, he realised

there were a lot of things about it that needed to change.

One thing was the addition of a romantic subplot

and the addition of a female character,

more than one female character, but as a central character,

the Madeleine Carroll character.

And there is sort of an eye towards the commercial

when it came to this very loose adaptation,

because Hitch was interested in blending genre,

because he was interested in continuing to make thrillers,

and also because he knew that a romantic subplot

would also attract another element of British audiences.

So all of these things ended up coalescing

into an adaptation which wasn't a very strict adaptation at all

of the original material. I read it at school,

and I have to say, it left a really strong mark on me.

For nothing else, the actual description

of the murder of the person who is actually...

starts the whole story off.

In the case of the book, it's Scudder, a journalist,

who has uncovered a plot

to kill the Greek premier.

And when Richard Hannay, who is looking after him,

he's staying in his flat, arrives back in his flat,

he finds Scudder's body on the floor.

And the line is, "There was a long knife through his heart

that skewered him to the floor."

I think it was the word "skewered" that made all the difference.

I had never read anything like this at the time.

And so it is that I think it became

a good start in terms of

the next generation of adventure novels.

Adventure novels that had a hero who was almost an anti-hero,

somebody who was caught between a rock and a hard place,

caught between the authorities who thought he had done the murder,

and, of course, the bad guys.

So he's on the run and he's caught between

literally two sets of protagonists, who are both after him.

This, of course, is classic Hitchcock material.

Magazines, chocolates, cigarettes...

There he is.

In what sense do you think his novels,

and particularly The 39 Steps, were revolutionary for their time?

Was he inventing the spy genre?

What he was doing,

and he says very much in the introduction,

was he was taking a form that he and his friend loved,

which was these terrible, terrible invasion thrillers.

There had been a book called The Riddle of the Sands,

which had been the very first sort of idea of...

almost the first spy novel in the modern sense,

but it's really a book about boats,

and it sort of posits the idea that the Germans may be about to invade.

And it really was a book that caused a stir because that was a lot...

you know, it was way before the First World War,

and it created this idea of, "what if the Germans do come?"

And so then people were pumping out versions of this book

again and again, which he and his friends seemed

to read as a guilty pleasure. And he says in the introduction,

"I'm writing, you know, one of these shockers, one of these terrors."

But he was a really good writer.

And so he takes this idea of these

trashy genre thrillers,

and he makes it into really the first true...

arguably the first true spy story.

There had been spy stories, there have been spy stories for 100 years,

but this was the one which creates the modern spy.

And I think that, you know...

the tricks and traps that Richard Hannay uses

are ones that then go on to be used by spies

throughout the 20th century in spy fiction.

Adapting the book with regular co-writer Charles Bennett,

Hitchcock took a cavalier approach to the novel.

Most of the film is his own invention.

The title in the book refers to a literal set of steps

to a secret rendezvous point.

In the film, it becomes an illusive code

for an entire organisation.

The Vaudevillian feats of the Memory Man,

the musical bookends,

and a strong-willed female lead are all Hitchcock,

as, of course, is the delicious potential

of his co-stars being handcuffed together.

Hitchcock had read the book as a young man,

in fact as a teenager, and he'd actually devoured it, he loved it.

And so it was very much in his mind

when it came to looking for the next project

after The Man Who Knew Too Much.

At first, he was going to adapt Greenmantle,

which was the second Richard Hannay book,

and he and his scriptwriter, Charles Bennett,

went through the book and realised that there were

far too many locations and it was...

some of it was in Egypt, there was sort of...

it was going all over the place. And so they went back

to the first one, The 39 Steps,

which was at least better contained

in terms of its locations,

and would be less expensive to actually make.

So Francois Truffaut called The 39 Steps

"the synthesis of all of Hitchcock's British films,"

and you can see that because there are elements of the wrong-man plot,

which are taken from a film like his silent film, The Lodger,

and there are other blonde characters in...

blonde women in his films up till now,

but the quintessential Hitchcock blonde appears

in the form of Madeleine Carroll's Pamela in this movie.

It really is just sort of firing on all cylinders.

So all the other kind of films,

which are still great films in many cases,

are sort of dry runs in many ways,

for this to become kind of the film that's an international success.

Hello? What are we stopping for?

Oh, it's a whole flock of detectives.

Sheep all over the road, damned silly things.

Get out, both of you, and clear them away.

What about him? I'll soon fix that.

There, Miss. Now you're a special constable.

What's the idea? As long as you stay, he stays.

Yes, and as long as I go, you go. Come on.

Stop them! They've got away!

Come on! I won't!

We must be a mile away by now.

Don't do that!

Oh, do stop whistling.

What are you doing all this for? You can't possibly escape.

What chance have you got, tied to me?

Hitchcock had seen Robert Donat on stage in Saint Joan.

He was handsome and magnetic without question.

But the director detected the right combination

of determination and uncertainty for his put-upon hero.

Drolly level-headed, Donat's Hannay is the model

for Cary Grant and James Stewart.

Robert Donat has this kind of easy confidence

where you sense that he's a man who is not easily swayed.

He has a kind of strength, a kind of steel backbone.

And he also seems like someone who...

is kind of able to be calm under pressure.

He's not frantic, even though the situation

should require him to be pretty frantic.

He has been wrongly accused of murdering a woman,

but he's able to maintain some calm.

And given that he is supposed to be an ordinary citizen

and not a trained spy or anything like it,

I sometimes feel it's giving off slight kind of proto-007 vibes,

just because he's so kind of charismatic.

Tell me about Richard Hannay in the book.

He's quite different to the character we see in the film to come, isn't he?

Very, very different. I mean, he's...

Richard Hannay in the film is an everyman,

and the Richard Hannay of the book is not at all.

He's come back from South Africa with a lot of money,

and he's very scornful about the sort of the decadent home country.

He's very down on people, he's very rude,

he's quite racist, he's quite unpleasant.

He's also very, very skilled in the ways of the Transvaal,

the kind of... the bush craft.

So there's certain sequences in the book

where his bush craft is incredible.

I mean, he really understands the wilds, he understands disguise.

He's much more professional about being on the run

than the Richard Hannay of the book, who's just a bloke really.

So he's got a certain amount of pass that he brings to it,

but you wouldn't want to have... I mean, I would prefer

to have dinner with the film Richard Hannay

than I would with the book Richard Hannay.

I mean, if you just wanted to see a sort of a good example

of, you know, the calibre of British acting talent

at that time in the United Kingdom,

all you have to do is watch The 39 Steps.

I mean, they're all there. Everybody is in it.

Oh, come in. Come on in.

Oh, the young lady's terrible wet.

Oh, yes, we had an accident with our car a few miles back.

Oh. You'll be staying the night? Yes.

We've just the one room left with the one bed in it.

But you'll not be minding that.

Oh, no, no, no, quite the reverse.

Yeah, we always talk about plot and thrills with Hitchcock,

but this film lives or dies by its two leads.

Because actually it's quite a small cast in the end, isn't it?

Now, I think he always wanted Robert Donat as Hannay,

but tell me a little bit about why it was,

what were the qualities that Donat had that made him perfect?

I mean, Donat's career was dogged by ill health

and by unpleasant experiences in America,

but just as he was working with Hitchcock,

he was on his way to being a matinee idol film star.

He was incredibly good looking, he had a lot of style and charm.

At that point, Britain didn't really have that many

young, handsome star actors.

It had a lot of great sort of character actors

and a lot of older actors, but this idea of a young,

dashing male actor with a kind of light sensibility.

He was not... You know, he was not a doom laden Hamlet-style actor.

He was someone who could be funny, he could be witty,

he could be the kind of actor who Hitchcock then spent

the rest of his career searching to work with.

You know, he was the future Cary Grant.

He had these great qualities to him.

And he had just been to America where he'd played

the lead in the Count of Monte Cristo, very convincingly.

And Warner's had signed him to a contract.

They want him to play Captain Blood, the role that, in the end,

went to Errol Flynn, and he turned down Captain Blood.

"I really don't want to work in Hollywood."

Came back to the UK, set about doing smaller films and stage work.

And so he was... he was hot for a start.

He was hot, he was talented, he was attractive,

and he had an everyman quality. And Hitchcock was hungry for him.

They are so terribly in love with each other.

I can't stand it any longer! I'm going to tell them the whole story.

And hang me for a murder I never committed?

I don't care whether you committed it or not! Let me go!

You think I'm going to spend the whole night with you?

Course you are. What else can you do? Come on.

Can I come in, sir?

If anything, the film is made by Madeleine Carroll,

then one of the top box office draws in Britain.

Tending toward an icy screen presence,

Hitchcock gave her the mystifying instruction to be herself.

In person, Carroll was witty and flirtatious.

There had been blondes in the director's work before,

but Carroll's indignant, alluring, magnificent Pamela,

is the first true Hitchcock blonde.

So Madeleine Carroll is the...

maybe the first Hitchcock blonde.

For quite a long time, she's very stubborn

and she is, you know, quite, you know,

in many ways, a bit frightened of him.

So they are not particularly friends through most of the film,

but they do have an incredible chemistry.

When the pair end up unwillingly handcuffed together,

they are then forced to work it out with one another

and even at one point, have to pretend to be honeymooners,

in order to get access into a hotel.

The interesting thing about Madeleine Carroll, is that she...

this was a role that she had never played before.

She was used to playing sort of rather cool,

aristocratic women with hauteur that nobody really sympathised with.

And she said she was getting tired of being typecast,

and that was one of the reasons that she took the role.

She said it, you know, it reminded her a little

of Claudette Colbert's role in It Happened One Night,

And that was the sort of thing she wanted to do.

And it was that fact and her contribution

to making that role work,

that was... actually sort of built it up.

And it was built up during filming.

It wasn't actually written like that in the script,

in the shooting script. She...

She and Hitchcock and Alma Reville and indeed,

Charles Bennett, all realised that this is...

this was going to be a really, really interesting role for her

and it would actually enhance the film.

So in many ways,

she contributed to that character

as much as the screenwriters.

On the first day his leads were together on set,

Hitchcock made a great ceremony of handcuffing them together,

then promptly claimed to have lost the key,

leaving his flustered stars to cope.

When they finally began to laugh,

he miraculously found the key.

The director knew the handcuffs would stir

all kinds of thoughts in the audience.

More than that, the chemistry between his stars was essential.

By stealth, Hitchcock was making a romance.

They are literally coupled.

It's so much a film ahead of its time, isn't it?

That sparring romance, that kind of chemistry

that you know where it's going, feels very modern,

yet this film is 1935. Absolutely,

and there's a sequence when they are handcuffed together

and they're in a hotel room,

and she's going to take her damp stockings off.

And Hitchcock shoots her taking the stockings off

and it's very languorous camera work,

with Richard Hannay's hand

sort of stroking her leg, but sort of not,

which I think is one of the most sensual shots

that he's almost ever done.

But this is actually genuinely a sensual exploration

of this attractive woman with this man handcuffed to her.

And it's quite remarkable. I mean, it's an incredibly racy sequence.

Shot in the spring of 1935,

Hitchcock's 20-second film

sees a director thrilling to the possibilities of the medium.

This was now a story only a film could tell.

His ambition was a succession of episodes,

each a film within itself.

The craft is breathtaking.

Those brilliant, telling close-ups,

iconic shot of a screaming woman

drowned out by the shrill call

of a station whistle from the next scene.

For one thing, they're much prettier than they were 20 years ago.

More free. Free and easy. You're right there.

I could never understand how people used to put up

with the old-fashioned sort, all bones and no bend.

What I will say for the old-fashioned, they did last longer.

I don't know. Mine last about a year.

Here, I'll show you.

A big demand for these now.

The old-fashioned sort. Brrrr. My wife.

Now take a look at these.

The power of The 39 Steps lies in its momentum.

The hero escapes by train,

nearly coming to grief on the Forth Bridge.

Plot details remain in the background,

almost beside the point.

What counts is Hannay's escalating predicament,

how he evades capture, how he clears his name,

and how he wins over the girl.

The extraordinary thing is how many different elements

there are in this film that Hitchcock has such confidence

with exploring and depicting,

and as I said, very, very quickly,

you know, this film does not hang about.

It moves like a rocket.

He even manages to get in a primitive helicopter flying across,

and which was an autogyro. He'd heard about it.

It was a man, a Scottish industrialist,

he used to fly to work in an autogyro,

and he said, "I want a bit of that, we're going to have that in there."

And sure enough, I mean you've got your first helicopter chase.

Well, I mean, that...

that will appear again in another form

in North By Northwest, with Cary Grant being chased

by a crop-dusting plane. Fantastic stuff.

Now, Mr Hannay, I suppose it's safe to call you by your real name now?

What about our mutual friend, Annabella?

She's been murdered. Murdered?

Oh, the Portland Mansions affair?

What our friends outside are looking for you for.

I didn't do it. Of course you didn't.

The 39 Steps is Hitchcock at his most playful.

The increasing absurdity of Hannay's situation is often comical.

Hitchcock loathed those spoilsports he termed "the plausible,"

relishing the implausibility

of newspaper headlines arriving hours after the event,

of blind chance and coincidence saving the day,

of his audience being swept up by emotion.

I think one of the interesting things that strikes me

is that we always think of Hitchcock somehow as an urban director,

a city-bound director, yet this is a film about landscape, is it not?

He is very good at doing it. I mean, he does this...

It is, of course, a remake of The 39 Steps.

He does this particularly well in North By Northwest,

but what he is very good at doing

is setting up a situation

where there can clearly be no threat

because the man is in the middle of nowhere,

and he loved talking about this. The man is in the middle of nowhere.

As far as you can see, there is no threat.

And yet, as an audience, you know, because of the filmmaker,

because of the music, because of what's going on,

that he's in deadly peril, and then how...

what you're wondering is, how is that peril going to arrive?

We know this is terrible,

but we can't see any way in which it could be terrible.

What could possibly be about to happen?

So the audience suspense is,

it's much, much harder for people to figure out what's about to happen,

when you're in the middle of nowhere than in a crowded street.

Arthur Conan Doyle wrote that briefly,

Sherlock Holmes says this at one point.

He says to Watson, "You find the City of London scary, Watson.

I'm at my most scared in the countryside."

And that's I think what Hitchcock takes this idea of the fear

of the barren environment where there's nothing,

but you are in great peril. And he does it brilliantly.

I mean, outdoors for him is an incredibly dangerous place to be.

If you look at the legacy of The 39 Steps,

you will see elements,

if not the entire script, then you will see huge chunks

of this film played out

over and over again across the decades in films.

And this was the one that started it all.

For example, when Robert Donat and Madeleine Carroll are,

in fact, when they are handcuffed together

and they're on the run across the moors

from the bad police, of course, the fake police,

the secret agents, where do they hide?

They hide behind a waterfall.

When was the last time we saw that? The Last of the Mohicans.

That's exactly what Daniel Day-Lewis does with Madeleine Stowe,

if you think, and probably many other times before that.

There are tropes in this film of...

that have become almost cliches,

but he, Hitchcock originated them.

And on and on they go.

Absolutely extraordinary legacy of all kinds of elements.

But the other one is when Robert Donat

leaps and smashes through the police station front window

to escape, and what does he do?

He joins a parade of Salvation Army people,

because he knows that if he sort of ducks down inside them,

the cops won't be able to see them.

That scene has been played out during several films,

notably The Fugitive with Harrison Ford.

I mean, all of these elements and all of these sequences

originated in The 39 Steps.

They hadn't been played out before, and yet,

you see them repeated time and again,

right up until the 21st century.

Under the cover of a thriller,

the film also explores the perils of marriage.

What is it confirmed bachelor Hannay is actually running away from?

He fools the milkman that he is absconding

from an affair, rather than a murder.

He is taken in by a heartbreaking Peggy Ashcroft,

trapped in a loveless marriage to puritanical crofter, John Laurie.

In contrast,

we get the warm-hearted couple at the inn,

who take Hannay and Pamela for newly-weds.

By the end, those handcuffs have become an engagement ring.

It's a really strange and very powerful section of the film

wherein our main character,

is holing up

in this remote cottage with a Scottish crofter,

and his much younger wife called Margaret.

And he sort of befriends Margaret.

The husband is very severe,

he's very religious,

ultimately a hypocrite because he's after...

you know, he's fairly money grubbing.

It's a very, very unpleasant depiction of this man.

But his wife seems...

bullied and put upon

and desperate for excitement and city life.

You really feel sorry for this character.

The whole segment of the film is filmed almost like proto film noir.

It's full of shadow, it's...

Yeah, it's a really dark and poignant scene,

ultimately as well because we return

to these characters a little bit later in the film.

She gives a jacket of her husband's

and it has a prayerbook, a hymnal book in the pocket,

which proves to be very important to the plot.

Later on when her husband is seen to have discovered this,

you hear, just off screen, her being slapped in the face.

So it's a very dark portrait of marriage

and I guess gender... you know, gender relations.

But one idea that does potentially tie it all together

is that it's a film about marriage,

it's a portrait of marriage, in very different ways.

We get a lot of different married couples, as you said,

and obviously Hannay is set up as this confirmed bachelor

and you start to wonder, what is he running away from indeed?

And obviously the handcuffs become a symbol of...

being chained to your wife, you know,

it's a double-edged joke with Hitchcock.

But is this a film about marriage?

It is in a way, isn't it? I mean, the relationships

become more and more successful as the film goes on,

and as Richard and...

Richard and Pamela become closer and closer and closer,

you find...

marriage around them is less aggressive and less dark.

So when he's by himself,

he encounters terrible marriages, marriages which are about

a villain and his plotting, scheming wife,

but then as things smooth between him and Pamela,

they encounter more and more sort of reasonable marriages.

And it's almost like the film is teaching him, very slowly,

that it's OK to marry this woman.

The 39 Steps delighted audiences everywhere,

but most significantly, became Hitchcock's

first major hit in America.

While made in Britain, it was an international film,

bursting with glamour and excitement.

Dubbed the British Clark Gable, Robert Donat became an instant star

and Madeleine Carroll a sex symbol.

There's only so long Michael Balcon was going to be able to deflect

Hollywood's interest in his director.

The other thing that is a constant in Hitchcock's films,

which are... again, that start here,

are the idea of fifth columnists,

that secret agents, this sort of cabal of agents

operating inside a country

and pretending to be sort of respectable members of a community,

while at the same time, seeking to destroy it.

Remember the time it was made, 1935.

You know, war is in the air, everybody is very uncertain,

and people stop trusting people.

And one thing about this film

is that it's all about trust and betrayal.

Betrayal and trust. Who do you trust?

That is one of the reasons that we stick, as the audience,

so closely to Richard Hannay.

We see what he sees at the same time.

We are not ahead of the game, and we're not behind it.

Hitchcock makes sure that we are placed in Hannay's position

so that when he realises things, we realise them at the same time.

In some senses, The 39 Steps was a film for its times.

Hitchcock was turning a nervy eye toward a Europe

where storm clouds were gathering.

Equally, it was a film that echoed through his career.

At the height of his Hollywood fame,

he would near enough remake it as North by Northwest.

But that political undertone remained in his work.

Hitchcock was very aware of the fact,

when he made North by Northwest over 20 years later,

that he was basically

remaking a film that he had made before,

except he had a much larger budget,

it was in colour,

and there is actually a scene in the novel of The 39 Steps,

which doesn't make it exactly into the 1935 film,

but that he then kind of steals and uses in North by Northwest,

which is the famous scene of Cary Grant

trying to escape from the aeroplane.

Probably didn't have the budget or the capacity to pull that off

in 1935 under the circumstances,

but in 1959, he did.

So, it is in many ways just a bigger version

of what came before, with Cary Grant,

who is much like Robert Donat;

very suave, very capable,

but also somebody who you believe could be dragged

into these strange circumstances and has a certain haplessness as well.

It's a first for everybody.

Ian Fleming said, "Without Richard Hannay,

there would be no James Bond."

These are huge claims.

And yet, you look at it, and you look at it in the context

of the films certainly, they're right.

There is nothing like it beforehand,

and then immediately,

it sort of struck gold with an audience,

it struck a sort of chord with people, who think, "Wow!

Why haven't we seen anything like this before?"

Well, they were going to see a lot more after it.

There's no fat on it, there's just...

I mean, there are so many layers to it,

but there is nothing that's wasted

by looking at anything, "Ah, isn't this wonderful?" or...

you know, all we have is the movement

of Richard Hannay from the music hall to the music hall,

and then via the North of Scotland and back again.

That's all we need.

It feels foolish to rank the films of Alfred Hitchcock.

There are so many we now consider signal moments of cinema,

films which we watch in the full knowledge

we are in the hands of the great, Hitch.

But his British masterpiece is the moment

that genius comes into focus.

The 39 Steps confirms his mastery of suspense.

Am I right, sir?

Quite right, old chap.

Thank you, sir. Thank you.

I'm glad it's off my mind, at last.

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