The 39 Steps

Frost's Descent was yesterday; the Beginning of Winter is two weeks off. This is the stretch of the year when the light goes fastest.

The link between today's two films is neither a year nor a country. It is a single situation: a performance already under way, and someone in the audience who suddenly recognises themselves in it.

Hitchcock stages it in a London music hall, where a man who earns his living by remembering is on stage and a man just accused of murder is in the seats. The whole film turns on one minute: the man stands up and shouts a question, and the man on stage cannot stop answering.

The other film, Late Spring, stages the same situation in a Noh theatre. In the dark, a father smiles at a widow in the next seat; his daughter says nothing, and the camera simply stays on her face.

伦敦一家杂耍剧场里，观众正为一位记忆大师的表演叫好，忽然响起枪声。

混乱中，一个刚到此地的加拿大人扶住了一个发抖的女人。她说自己是间谍，说刚才那两枪是她开的，说门外有人在等她。

当天夜里，她死在他的公寓里，背上插着一把刀，手里攥着一张苏格兰高地的地图，上面有一个地名被圈了起来。

他连她的全名都没弄清，就已经成了全城通缉的杀人犯。

This is the film that fixed the template of the innocent man on the run. Hitchcock had tried it in The Lodger (1927) and would try it again in Saboteur (1942) and North by Northwest (1959), but never so cleanly: 86 minutes, one line, no flashbacks, no narration, and a hero who never knows where he is running to.

In 1999 the British Film Institute ranked it the fourth-best British film of the twentieth century. It appears in the BFI's 100 essential thrillers (2017), came eighth on Time Out's 100 best thriller films (2022), and thirteenth on the same magazine's poll of the best British films (2017). Rotten Tomatoes: 96% from 53 reviews, 8.9/10 average. Metacritic: 93 from 15 critics.

Orson Welles called it a masterpiece. The screenwriter Robert Towne put it harder: it is not much of an exaggeration, he said, that all contemporary escapist entertainment begins with The 39 Steps.

It was also a cheap film. Gaumont-British backed it to break into the American market, and most of the money went to two leads who had already worked in Hollywood.