 Starring: Robert Donat, Madeleine Carroll, Godfrey Tearle, Lucie Mannheim, Peggy Ashcroft
Director: Alfred Hitchcock
Plot: After shots are heard during a theatre performance, Richard Hannay agrees to help a woman by taking her to his house. She reveals that she’s a spy trying to stop the theft of vital British military secrets, but the next thing he knows she’s been killed and all the evidence points to him. He goes on the run to avoid ending up in prison and also to find out what’s going on, with his only clues being a map highlighting a small place in Scotland and the woman’s unexplained reference to 39 steps. |
There are many, many impressive things about The 39 Steps, from the fact it was voted the 4th greatest British film of all time in a 1999 BFI poll and the way it showcases Hitchcock’s German expressionist influences, to quite how entertaining it is even after 74 years and that the modern thriller can pretty much trace it roots back to the way the film presents a never-ending series of thrilling chases and mysterious secrets, mixed with humour and a hero who doesn’t actually seem to mind too much about the danger he’s in. However one thing that’s not pointed out quite as often but which is even more impressive, is the way it shows how quickly and fully sound became a vital part of cinema.
The first sound movie appeared in America only eight years before, with many predicting it would be a fad that soon disappeared. Hitchcock himself directed the first proper British sound movie, Blackmail, in 1929. That film just had a few sound sequences shoved in at the very end of production to make use of the new technology, and they were pretty atrocious. The actress cast in the lead was foreign with a heavy accent and so had to be dubbed live (something that hadn’t mattered before), and as no one had any experience in how to use sound on the screen, the dialogue was astonishingly awful, with people talking about absolutely nothing, while doing the things that allows you to tell a silent story, but aren’t really necessary when you have sound.
However by 1935 and with a few more films under his belt, Hitchcock is already using sound in a very sophisticated and complex way (even now in the whole process of filmmaking, the importance and complexity of the audio is probably the most under-appreciated). There’s not just far better dialogue, but a whole world and different places are being created using ambient sound, from the bawdy crowd of the theatre to the hustle and bustle of the railway station.
It’s not just the fact that creating a full sense of place using sound came so quickly to cinema, but also that The 39 Steps is one of the first films to successfully use sound, and not just dialogue, to actually tell the story. From the gunshots at the beginning of film and using the baaing of sheep to cover up the sound of Robert Donat and Madeleine Carroll’s escape, to somebody whistling a few notes, which ends up being important to the plot, it’s incredibly impressive that filmmakers, even one as talented as Hitchcock, were able to bring such a complex and complete use of sound to the screen so quickly.
Even some things that seem ridiculously simple, such as people reacting to sounds that happen off-screen, were actually more difficult to pull-off back then than you’d think, just because audiences were only just becoming used to the ‘grammar’ of sound on the screen. For example in the film there’s one scene where a doorknob rattles off-screen, and you see someone look across. That sounds basic enough, but it actually relies on the audience understanding that the sounds they hear in a movie don’t necessarily come from things they can see in the picture (which isn’t actually as intuitive as you’d think), and that someone moving their head to look in a particular direction automatically implies they’re turning towards to where the sound is coming from. So without actually doing anything other than getting someone to move their head, Hitchcock can use sound to let you know where things are that you can’t see. You’ve never seen the door, but you know there is one and you know where it is, which is a fairly comple
x relationship to set up for an audience that was still getting used to sound cinema and therefore didn’t necessarily understand things in the way we do.
I know it sounds like I’m turning something incredibly simple into something immensely complex, but you have to remember there was nothing obvious about this when Hitchcock was making The 39 Steps. Filmmakers had only had a few years to experiment with and incorporate sound into their movies. Initially they didn’t know what audiences would intuitively know and accept, what viewers could pick up on with careful editing and how you would go about fully integrating sound into cinema.
Now we look at The 39 Steps and it all seems so obvious, simply because we’re so used to sound and pictures going together on screen. However back in 1935 people like Hitchcock were entering into a brave new world, and The 39 Steps is an incredibly impressive early example of how quickly they were able to go from a few scenes of crackly, stilted dialogue to creating entire worlds and opening up the possibilities of what it was possible to do using sound. If you can, just watch The 39 Steps again and actually listen to it and how it uses sound, and then just think about the fact that it was made only six years after Britain’s very first flirtation with sound on film. It’s an impressive achievement.
TIM ISAAC
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