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Movie Review: The 39 Steps (1935) [1]
['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.']
Date: 2023-11-04
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SPOILER ALERT!
Speaking as a bachelor, one who has never even lived with a woman, let alone been married to one, I can only look upon marriage as an outsider, gleaning what information I can from those with experience in the matter. I gather that marriage suits some people, others not so much.
Even people who are in love and looking forward to a life of connubial bliss will, in anticipating the wedding, refer to it affectionately as “tying the knot.” But the idea of being “handcuffed to a woman” would be an unlikely metaphor, if one wished to suggest a pleasant coupling with a permanent companion of the fair sex. Rather, that expression would put the idea of marriage in a bad light. It is not as bad, however, as referring to one’s wife as “the old ball and chain,” for at least handcuffs allow the woman the dignity of being an equal partner in that misery.
Although The 39 Steps is similar to other movies directed by Alfred Hitchcock where an innocent man gets caught up in a situation in which he must flee from the police while pursuing some spies in hopes of proving his innocence, such as Saboteur (1942) or North by Northwest (1959), it is unique among them as being the only one in which the protagonist is literally handcuffed to a woman for some time during the movie. As such, we cannot help but think of their situation figuratively as well, in the sense referred to above. It should not be surprising, then, that the theme of marriage as an unpleasant business recurs throughout The 39 Steps.
At the beginning of this movie, we see a man enter a place called Music Hall, somewhere in London, purchasing a ticket for a seat in the “stalls,” which is British for the central seats up front in a theater. Just as he sits down, the Master of Ceremonies introduces a man called Mr. Memory, a man with a photographic memory, who has memorized millions of facts about sports, geography, history, and science. He asks the audience to challenge Mr. Memory with questions. “Ladies first,” he says. With this, the theme of misogamy gets underway.
“Where’s my old man been since last Saturday?” a woman hollers out. There are jeers from others in the audience, purporting to answer her question:
“On the booze!”
“In quod [prison]!”
“Out with his bit [young woman]!”
The jokes being over, the audience begins asking serious questions, mostly about sports. Whenever Mr. Memory answers a question in great detail, he asks, “Am I right, sir?” The response is always in the affirmative.
But questions implying the sorry state of marriage persist. When a man asks what causes pip [infectious coryza] in poultry, his wife scolds him, saying, “Don’t make yourself so common.”
When someone asks, who was the last British heavyweight champion of the world, someone yells out, “My old woman!” Mr. Memory gives a serious answer to the question, then asking, “Am I right, sir?” He is assured that he is right.
Someone asks how old Mae West is. Mr. Memory says, “I know, sir, but I never tell a lady’s age.”
Finally, the man we saw entering Music Hall in the beginning turns out to be played by Robert Donat, who asks how far Winnipeg is from Montreal. The purpose of this question is to let us know he is from Canada and just visiting. We later find out his name is Richard Hannay.
The man who asked how old Mae West is keeps asking, becoming belligerent. A policeman goes over to restrain the man, and a scuffle breaks out involving several members of the audience, fists flying. The Master of Ceremonies makes a final crack about marriage, saying, “Gentlemen, gentlemen, please! You’re not at home!”
We see a pistol firing a shot and then another shot. Panic breaks out, everyone heading for the exit. Hannay gets thrown together with a good-looking woman and helps her out the door. When outside, she asks, “May I come home with you?”
“What’s the idea?” he replies.
“I’d like to,” she says.
“It’s your funeral,” he shrugs, another case in which the figurative will turn out to be literal.
We assume Hannay thought she was trying to pick him up, and he was agreeable to the idea of having sex with her. That’s not much of a sin, not even by the standards of 1935, but he will soon be punished disproportionately for it, nevertheless.
As it turns out, she is a spy, going by the name of Annabella Smith. She says she is “freelance,” meaning she works for whoever pays her the most money. She refuses to say which country she is from, but she is played by Lucie Mannheim, a German actress, and she speaks with a foreign accent. At the moment, she is working for England, trying to prevent a secret vital to the air defense of England from leaving the country. She had followed two spies to Music Hall, but when they spotted her, she fired two shots with her pistol to create a diversion.
She should have asked herself why those two spies would be at Music Hall, because that was an important clue, as we find out at the end of the movie. In any event, she tells Hannay that the two spies are with the 39 Steps, without exactly explaining what that is. Heading this organization, she says, is a dangerous man with a joint missing on the pinky of his right hand. She asks Hannay for a map of Scotland, saying there is a man she must meet there.
That having been established, let’s back up for a minute. When Hannay and Annabella got on the bus just outside Music Hall, the two spies did not jump on the bus with them, so there is no indication they were followed. Hannay and Annabella got off at a hotel, where Hannay said he had just rented a furnished flat, so recently that there are still dust covers draped over the furniture. And yet, within ninety seconds of their entering the hotel, the spies are just outside, at a phone booth, trying to get Hannay on the phone.
Even if we allow that the spies surreptitiously followed them to the hotel, there is no way they could know which flat he had rented. And even if they did, there is no way they could know what his phone number was. And what would that conversation on the phone have been like anyway? “Mr. Hannay,” I suppose they might ask, “may we speak to Annabella, please?” In any event, Annabella tells Hannay not to answer the phone.
Hannay tells Annabella she can sleep in his bed, pausing just long enough to titillate us, before adding that he’ll sleep on the couch. Early the next morning, Annabella staggers into the living room with a knife in her back, clutching the map of Scotland, telling Hannay he will be next. Then the phone starts ringing again.
I had enough trouble trying to imagine the reason for the first phone call. This one really stumps me. Let’s try to imagine it anyway in a conversation between the spies:
Spy Number 1: Did you kill Annabella?
Spy Number 2: Stabbed her with a knife.
Spy Number 1: Did you kill Hannay while you were up there?
Spy Number 2: What for?
Spy Number 1: Annabella may have told him everything she knows. I’ll try getting him on the phone again.
Spy Number 2: What for?
Spy Number 1: If he is still home, you can run back up there and kill him too.
Meanwhile, there is phone call that did not take place. Had I been in Hannay’s position, I would have called the police and explained what happened. Instead, Hannay decides he will have to go to Scotland and find the man Annabella was going to see, so that that man can call the police and explain what happened.
In order to make his escape from the two spies waiting outside the hotel, he tries to bribe the milkman into lending him his coat and hat as a disguise. He explains about the spies and the murdered woman in his flat, but the milkman doesn’t believe him. Then he tries another approach. “Are you married?” he asks the milkman.
In keeping with this movie’s low regard for marriage, the milkman replies, “Yes, but don’t rub it in.”
Hannay says he is a bachelor, who has been having an affair with a married woman in the hotel, and the two men outside are her brother and husband. The milkman smiles, now a willing conspirator in helping Hannay get away, undoubtedly wishing that he were still a bachelor who could have sex with married women, the best kind of sex there is, and the safest too, aside from the danger posed by cuckolded husbands.
Hannay manages to make his escape that way. He boards a train heading for Scotland. The spies spot him and try to catch the train but fail. In the compartment Hannay enters, a salesman in ladies’ lingerie is explaining to another man about his company’s new line of corsets, much prettier than the old sort. To prove his point, he holds up an example of the old sort, a flat-boned corset.
“Brrr!” the other man replies, as if experiencing a chill. “My wife!”
When the train stops, the salesman buys a newspaper. It has a story about Hannay and the murdered woman, which Hannay is able to read while sitting across from the salesman. The police board the train, looking for him. Hannay sees a woman, whose name we later learn is Pamela, played by Madeleine Carroll, alone in a compartment. He enters and forcibly embraces her, kissing her, so the police will think they are lovers. He apologizes, explains who he is, and claims to be innocent. But when the police enter, she gives him away. Nevertheless, he manages to escape.
Using the map he removed from Anabella’s hand after she died, on which she had encircled a place called Alt-na-Shellac, Hannay tries getting there on foot. He arrives at a “croft,” which is what they called a small, rented farm in Scotland, with use of a shared pasturage. He finds out from the crofter that there is an English professor at Alt-na-Shellac, but as it is fourteen miles away, he asks if the crofter can put him up for the night, which he agrees to do for “two and six,” but don’t expect me to translate British currency into American dollars.
They go to the man’s small house, where a woman is at the door. As she appears to be much younger than the crofter, Hannay asks, “Your daughter?”
“My wife,” comes the curt reply.
Theirs is a miserable marriage. All the previous digs at marriage were jests compared to this. The woman is comely enough, not as good looking as Annabella, nor as pretty as Pamela, yet we feel she could have done better. But then, this is 1935, a time when women were much more in need of a husband as a way of making it in this world than they are today, so she probably had to take what she could get. We sense she is attracted to Hannay, and we wish he could take her away from her husband, who is a mean-spirited, religious fanatic, but it was not meant to be.
If there is such a thing as a woman’s intuition, she has it in spades. From his interest in a newspaper article about the murder, she figures out that he is Hannay. He admits everything, and she believes his explanation. The crofter can tell something is going on between them, but he figures it is sexual. In the middle of the night, she sees a car approaching, and she wakes Hannay, telling him it must be the police. When the crofter catches them, Hannay tells him about his situation. While the crofter is talking to the police, trying to find out if there is a reward, the woman helps Hannay escape, giving him a dark coat so he won’t be spotted. She says that when her husband finds out it is missing, “He’ll pray at me, but no more.” Hannay kisses her affectionately on the lips and leaves. She looks down, sad to be left alone. Later, when the crofter finds out about the missing coat, he hits her in the face.
With the police in pursuit, Hannay makes his way to Alt-na-Shellac. Unfortunately, it turns out that the professor who lives there, Professor Jordan, to be exact, has a missing joint on his right pinky. Presumably, Annabella did not realize that Jordan was the very man she warned Hannay about.
Jordan offers to let Hannay take the easy way out by committing suicide, presenting him with a pistol for that purpose. Now, I would have agreed with the suggestion, taken the pistol from the Jordan, and then used it to make my way out of his house. But that doesn’t occur to either man because this is a movie, and even in a good movie directed by Alfred Hitchcock, people do stuff they would never do in real life.
As a parenthetical aside, Jordan’s gun is a semi-automatic, but he refers to it as a revolver. I have lost count of the number of old movies I have seen where a semi-automatic is referred to as a revolver. On the other hand, I have never seen the reverse situation, a movie in which someone refers to a revolver as a semi-automatic.
Anyway, Hannay refuses to shoot himself, so Jordan shoots him instead. Hannay collapses, and Jordan believes him to be dead. But it turns out that the crofter’s coat had his hymn book in it, which stopped the bullet. When Hannay comes to, he makes it to the local sheriff’s office. But the sheriff doesn’t believe him, and a handcuff is placed on his right hand. At that point, Hannay crashes through the window and makes another escape. He blends in with members of the Salvation Army marching down the street before leaving them and entering a place called Assembly Hall, where he is mistaken for the featured speaker. While trying to bluff his way through a speech with a lot of platitudes, who should walk in the room but Pamela, the woman on the train, just one of those outrageous coincidences often found in the movies. Soon after, the two spies enter the room, and Pamela, mistaking them for the police, informs them of what they already know, which is that the speaker is Hannay.
They “arrest” Hannay and insist that Pamela come along with them to the police station. Hannay figures out that these men are not the police, but spies. When the car is forced to stop on account of some sheep, one of the spies attaches the other end of the handcuff onto Pamela’s left wrist to keep Hannay from escaping, which he does anyway, dragging Pamela with him, unwillingly, since she still thinks the two men are the police.
After they get away, she tells him it is futile for him to go on like this, trying to escape. “What chance have you got tied to me?” she asks.
Reminding us of the figurative sense of their situation, he replies, “That question’s for your husband.”
Because she still believes Hannay is a murderer, he is able to compel her cooperation with threats, along with some physical force. He decides they will spend the night at an inn, pretending to be a married couple. The owners of the inn are a married couple themselves, the husband smiling knowingly as Pamela signs them in, figuring they are only pretending to be married, but the wife believes they are married in fact, and she is happy for them, since they seem to her to be so very much in love. Because Pamela is acting under duress, it is strange that the wife interprets her behavior in that way. This is similar to a scene in Saboteur, in which a married couple witness Robert Cummings kidnapping Priscilla Lane, dragging her into a car against her will, and the wife says, “My, they must be terribly in love.”
Hannay and Pamela got wet hiding under a waterfall during their escape. In their room, Pamela cannot remove her wet coat, of course, but she does remove her stockings, with Hannay’s hand following hers down to her feet as she does so. Then they turn to the matter of the bed. Reluctant at first but resigned to the fact that they will have to share that bed, she climbs on it, Hannay following.
Possibly because of all the twin beds married couples used to occupy in old movies, there is the notion that a man and a woman in an old movie, even if they were married, could not both be on the same bed unless one of them had at least one foot on the floor. That rule is nowhere the Production Code, and there are numerous movies in which this supposed rule is violated even though receiving the seal of approval from the Production Code Administration. Still, it is interesting that while Hannay lies flat on the bed, his head resting on a pillow, Pamela falls asleep sitting up, resting against the headboard, rather than lying down next to him.
But just as we are accepting this situation of a man and woman in an old movie being on a bed together, we begin to wonder about their need to use the toilet. That reminds me of a crude joke about when you know the honeymoon is over, but it would be indelicate of me to repeat it here. Suffice it to say that the movie leaves that to our imagination.
When Pamela wakes up, she manages, with some effort, to slide her hand out of the handcuff. She starts to escape, but just as she leaves the room, she overhears the two spies down below, using the telephone, referring to the 39 Steps and something about Professor Jordan clearing out and picking up someone at the London Palladium.
Realizing that Hannay has been telling her the truth, she returns to the room. She looks at Hannay, still asleep in the bed, and she affectionately pulls the blanket up and around him so that he will be warm and comfy. She wants to go back to sleep, but she can’t bring herself to get back in that bed with him, so she tries sleeping on the couch. But the room is cold, and she is uncomfortable. She looks back at Hannay and the blanket she covered him with. She gets ahold of the blanket, slides it off him, and uses it to cover herself. Now she is warm and comfy and able to go to sleep. I wouldn’t know from personal experience, but I’ve been told that marriage is like that.
When Hannay wakes up the next morning, she tells him what happened. The two of them head back to London. Hannay goes to the London Palladium, which is a respectable establishment, catering to the middle class, as opposed to the rowdy, working-class patrons of Music Hall. After all, someone like Professor Jordan would be out of place at Music Hall. Pamela goes to Scotland Yard. Having previously phoned them from the inn about the plot to smuggle vital secrets of the Air Ministry out of the country, she is told that they made inquiries, confirming that there are such secrets, but no papers are missing.
I guess we are supposed to forget that there is such a thing as microfilm and that pictures may have been taken of those papers, after which they were returned to keep anyone from realizing there has been mischief, much in the way Zachary Scott did in The Mask of Dimitrios (1944) or James Mason did in 5 Fingers (1952), which was based on a true story.
In any event, they let Pamela go so they can follow her, and she leads them to Hannay, just as Mr. Memory is being introduced. At the same time, Hannay spots Jordan in a private box just to the right of the stage, and he sees him showing Mr. Memory his pocket watch, indicating that time is of the essence. Just as Hannay is about to be taken into custody, he realizes that Mr. Memory is working with Jordan and has memorized the papers containing the vital secret. Running back into the stalls, he demands, “What are the 39 Steps?” Mr. Memory hesitates. When Hannay repeats the question, Mr. Memory answers, saying that the 39 Steps is an organization of spies.
Critics speculate as to why Mr. Memory answered the question about the 39 Steps truthfully. I believe it was a point of pride with him. He could not bring himself to say, “I don’t know.”
Just as Mr. Memory is about to say which country the 39 Steps works in behalf of, Jordan shoots Mr. Memory. Jordan is captured, and Mr. Memory, in his dying moments, surrounded by Hannay, Pamela, and the police detectives, reveals the vital engineering secret he has memorized. “Am I right, sir?” he asks. Assured by Hannay that he is, Mr. Memory dies a happy man, glad that it’s now off his mind.
While this is happening, we see the right hand of Hannay and the left hand of Pamela come together and hold on to each other. We gather that they will soon be handcuffed together again, only figuratively this time, by getting married. Notwithstanding the cynical attitude this movie has expressed about marriage throughout, we accept this as a happy ending.
[END]
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