THE 39 STEPS
1959, VCI, $14.99, 90m 57s, DVD By Tim Lucas
Long out of circulation here in America, this Eastman Color remake of Alfred Hitchcock’s 1935 classic neither adds to nor detracts from the original, but is nevertheless diverting on its own, somewhat broader terms. Ken- neth More stars as Richard Hannay, an everyday man about London town, who becomes in- volved in international espionage after attempting, in a public park, to return a dropped rattle to a pram-pushing nanny (Faith Brook) who disavows any con- nection with it. Nanny, in fact a secret agent (spy is “not a word we like to use”), later traces Hannay to his apartment and tells him enough of her present mission— McGuffinry involving sensitive information coded “Boomerang” and a secret or- ganization dubbed “The 39 Steps” whose ringleader (Barry Jones) is identifiable only by a foreshortened pinky—to involve him before she is knifed to death, while he’s off in the kitchen mak- ing her a cup of tea. In the lining of her rifled purse, Hannay finds a marked, secreted map of the Glenkirk area of Scotland and a ticket to that evening’s perfor- mance at a music hall theater, where clues provided in a perfor- mance by “Mr. Memory” (James Hayter) commit him to com- pleting her patriotic mission to contain Boomerang. He must somehow achieve this while elud- ing the nanny’s killers, two sinis- ter huntsmen for the spy ring (one of them Duncan Lamont,
Kenneth More and Taina Elg fill the roles originally played by Robert Donat and Madeleine Carroll in the Rank Organization remake of THE 39 STEPS.
best-remembered for his “hop- ping! leaping!” soliloquy in QUATERMASS AND THE PIT), and the police, who think him guilty of the murder, and despite being handcuffed for part of his plight to Miss Fisher (Taina Elg), a young but already stuffy school- marm who has once before be- trayed him to the police and cannot stand the sight of him. Hitchcock’s original, cleverly scripted by Charles Bennett to follow surprise with surprise, had taken liberties with John Buchan’s 1915 novel, particularly the intro- duction of a meet-cute love in- terest for literature’s solitary Hannay, and director Ralph Thomas (DEADLIER THAN THE MALE) and screenwriter Frank Harvey adhere to Hitchcock rather than Buchan, despite changing a lot of supporting character names. Kenneth More, playing an outgoing man of 35 at age 45, is not at all Buchan’s initially world-weary protagonist who finds reengagement with (and responsibility to) the world around him as a result of his ad- venture, and it’s a fault of his performance that he often seems more amused than adversed by his troubles. He likely did so at his director’s request, as the film’s goal seems more to lightly entertain rather than really put the bite on the viewer, with Clifton Parker’s sprightly main credits theme prompting us to wonder immediately if we’re sitting down to a comedy. Even so, More is likeable and impressively meets the physical demands of the story, overhanding across high girders and bicycling up steep hills. Taina Elg underplays her role just enough to complement More ideally, and an intimate scene between them, involving her handcuffed removal of her rain-soaked stockings is played so well it was included nearly intact in the trailer (3m 7s, also
included). The Scotland-bound adventure itself admits a wealth of familiar players from the Brit- ish isles, including comic actor Sid James as sympathetic truck driver who admits to having been “inside,” Peter Vaughan (STRAW DOGS) as a train constable, Carol White (PREHISTORIC WOMEN) as a schoolgirl on a train and, as extras, John Richardson and his future BLACK SUNDAY co-star Barbara Steele, who is onscreen for less than 10s in the center of a gathering at Glenkirk House at 55m 58s.
VCI’s anamorphic 1.78:1 pre- sentation (which looks composi- tionally tight from time to time) represents the film’s first domes- tic home video release, though it was previously issued in the UK as a PAL VHS formatted at its correct 1.66:1 ratio. The digitally restored color has a bold, garish complexion (very HORRORS OF THE BLACK MUSEUM!) that makes the clashy color-blindness of Maurice Carter’s interior art direction—exemplified by the vio- let silk curtains trumpeting from the windows of Hannay’s apart- ment (evidently the handiest fab- ric to quickly cover a brick wall looming offset)—hard to miss. The image is a trifle soft, indicat- ing some dialling down of the grain that is native to British pro- ductions of this period and sta- tion, but acceptable. The disc defaults to its original mono track, but it is complemented by an alternative 5.1 track that gives the frequently outdoors film a more winningly spatial ambience. Besides the trailer, the only other supplement is a generous stills gallery (4m 36s), in black-and- white and color, which play in slideshow format to non-diegetic jazz. Several of the shots are tes- taments to the now-dead art form of promotional still photography and quite a few offer amusing views of various sets without ceilings.
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