'The 39 Steps' (1935): A Masterclass in Suspense, Style and Screwball Charm

 

The 39 Steps (1935) is probably my second favorite Alfred Hitchcock film (after Vertigo). It’s the movie I usually use to introduce my peers to vintage cinema. In fact, it was the first title we screened in May at my school’s newly launched Cinema Club—founded by my two best friends and me, a trio we affectionately call “The Three Musketeers.”

This early Hitchcock thriller blends suspense with sharp wit, and it’s best experienced without too many spoilers. So I’ll tread lightly on plot details. The 39 Steps was adapted from John Buchan’s 1915 novel The Thirty-Nine Steps, but Hitchcock, along with screenwriters Charles Bennett and Ian Hay, reimagined it into something far more cinematic—and, in my opinion, narratively stronger.

Take the opening in the London music hall: the crowd is transfixed by a man called “Mr. Memory,” whose photographic recall is both amusing and, ultimately, crucial. This entire setup, including the character of Mr. Memory, was an invention of the filmmakers.

So was the decision to make the spy who sets the plot in motion a woman—a bold move that instantly adds dramatic charge.  Lucie Mannheim’s performance as the jittery agent is brief but unforgettable, and she’s the one who pulls Robert Donat’s unsuspecting everyman into a tangle of espionage and danger.

Perhaps the most significant departure from the book is the introduction of the character played by Madeleine Carroll. There’s no equivalent in Buchan’s novel, but her role is essential to the film’s emotional arc and tonal complexity. She also helped define a cinematic archetype: the cool, self-possessed “Hitchcock blonde.” Carroll’s first encounter with Donat’s character happens on a train from England to Scotland, but 1935 audiences would have known this wasn’t a one-off cameo—her name and image dominated the film’s posters. When the characters meet again, a screwball comedy thread is woven into the spy plot, and the two soon find themselves literally handcuffed together.

Carroll’s performance deserves more credit than it typically gets. Her poise, wit and physical timing rival the best of the screwball heroines who came to define the genre in Hollywood a few years later—Katherine Hepburn, Barbara Stanwyck, Ginger Rogers and Rosalind Russell among them. But Carroll was doing it in Britain, and earlier. I’d put her sharp delivery and comic finesse in The 39 Steps up against any of those classic performances.

Assessing acting in a Hitchcock film (or any film for that matter) can be complicated. Hitchcock famously preferred actors who surrendered themselves to his direction. He was skeptical of showy, “actorly” performances and believed that emotion and meaning should be created by the director through framing and editing. But Robert Donat was an actor who understood exactly how to work with—and for—the camera. He translated his stage training into a screen presence that feels nuanced and alive.

Donat even wrote about this transition in his 1938 essay “Film Acting,” published in the London anthology Footnotes to the Film (which also includes an essay by Hitchcock on directing). In his piece, Donat emphasizes the need for actors to construct moments that seem spontaneous onscreen but are in fact carefully designed to register with the camera. He recognized that film acting wasn’t about doing less, but about being expressive in more focused, cinematic ways—through the eyes, the hands, the voice.

There are several moments in The 39 Steps where Donat clearly uses this technique. When slicing bread in an early kitchen scene, he briefly trembles the knife before stepping away, signaling tension. Listening to Mannheim’s spy confession, he doesn’t react dramatically—he simply shifts his eyes upward and toward the camera, suggesting uncertainty and calculation. On the train, he conveys alarm through subtle flickers in his eyes and brows. And in a police station scene, he touches his mouth with his thumb, then glances at the thumb as if noting a nervous tic before regaining composure. It’s a fleeting gesture, but it reads as entirely natural and unforced—a choice that may have been directed, but was brought to life by Donat’s precision.

Hitchcock later described The 39 Steps to François Truffaut as a “film of episodes,” and I think that’s exactly right. Each episode has its own tone and rhythm, but all of them contribute to a satisfying whole. Personal favorites? The recurring “How old is Mae West?” joke during the Mr. Memory act never fails to amuse.

The scene on the train with the lingerie salesmen is a pitch-perfect blend of comedy and suspense, especially as they gossip about a murder in the newspaper. 

One of the film’s most affecting segments takes place in a remote farmhouse, where Donat’s fugitive character takes shelter with a deeply religious tenant farmer (John Laurie) and his much younger wife (Peggy Ashcroft). The tone is quieter, more melancholic. Ashcroft brings quiet depth to her brief role, and every time I watch the film, I think her character could anchor a whole movie.

 Still, the handcuffed night at the country inn with Carroll and Donat is my favorite sequence. The two actors have real comic chemistry, and the dialogue sparkles with tension and flirtation.

No look at a Hitchcock film is complete without addressing his use of the camera. His technical creativity—camera angles, editing, framing—invites the audience to shift constantly between detached observer and subjective participant. During the train scene, we move from objective coverage (Donat and the salesmen in alternating shots) to subjective point-of-view shots once Donat reads the paper and notices the man in glasses staring at him. Suddenly, we see through Donat’s eyes and feel his rising paranoia.

Another standout example of this subjectivity comes later, when Donat’s character is planning an escape. The camera cuts to his POV of a door, allowing the audience to follow his thought process before he even speaks. Conversely, in the farmhouse scene, Hitchcock uses objective framing to give us emotional insight into Peggy Ashcroft’s character—her wistful expression as she remembers Glasgow’s city lights says more than any line of dialogue could.

The cottage sequence also includes a classic Hitchcock touch: visual framing through inanimate objects. Donat, Laurie and Ashcroft are viewed through the bars of a chair, a composition technique Hitchcock would return to often—through banisters (Shadow of a Doubt), a cup (Notorious) or eyeglasses (Strangers on a Train). Cinematographer Bernard Knowles, who worked with Hitchcock again on Secret Agent (also with Madeleine Carroll) and Young and Innocent, gives The 39 Steps its crisp, shadowy look.

As I’d hoped, The 39 Steps was a hit at our Cinema Club screening. The audience was totally engaged, laughing at the right moments and gasping at the suspense. The biggest laugh came when Madeleine Carroll called Robert Donat a “big bully.” Afterward, our club forum lit up with enthusiastic (and spoiler-heavy) posts. A few were especially focused on Donat: “He is so cute!” “Those puppy-dog eyes!” and, perhaps my favorite, “Love the mustache—he looks like Timothée Chalamet.” One member even wrote: “This might be the best movie I’ve ever seen. I didn’t mind at all that it wasn’t in color.”

Our Cinema Club is the process of finalizing the next pick (for the summer edition), but I couldn’t have asked for a better film to kick things off. The 39 Steps is not just an essential pre-Hollywood Hitchcock—it’s a movie that proves vintage cinema can still surprise, delight and thrill new audiences.