The 39 Steps
Alfred Hitchcock, 1935
Who fired the gun?
Hitchcock trains your eye by constant camera movement. Isolation shots and camera angles tell you where to look, then amp up the skittish tension by withholding the thing you want to see. The quickening rhythm tangles up chase scenes of spy vs spy and lies where truth won’t do so deftly that when the camera pauses, you feel the urge to get hold of it and move it yourself.
Double crossing
There’s no subtlety: motives are brash, betrayals clearly marked. Suspense doesn’t come from surprise villains but from the ubiquitousness of corruption and misperceptions—bad people, bad places—while the protagonist has no choice but to plunge forward, improvising solutions moment to moment. Each escape only delays catastrophe meanwhile pulling Richard Hannay deeper into other people’s lives, where every innocent becomes trapped, like him, in the appearance of guilt.
Chase scenes
The ironic romance advances by the same screwball quicksand. Every attempt to escape binds the heroine Pamela more helplessly to a man she believes is a murderer. Eventually her only possible answers are pure Hitchcock: stark and comic. Be right and die, or be wrong and fall in love.
The Lux Index
86 minutes, B/W
Low stress trench coat: Romantic adventure in detective clothing
Good for a post work, takeout evening
Toughest challenge: merely annoyance if you don’t enjoy mimicking the nasal British accents and period-arcane elocution
Best scene: handcuffs. wet silk stockings, and sandwiches
Second best scene: a surreal Scottish crofter with fabulous sideburns who seems almost to have been cross cut in from another film