Authors: Patrick McGilligan
His suspicions piqued, Woolf asked to read the script for the next Hitchcock project—and tried to nip
The 39 Steps
in the bud too. Hitchcock and Ivor Montagu were called on the carpet. Woolf diagnosed the new script as “highbrow stuff” that would only give rise to “another piece of rubbish,” and gave the director and associate producer one month to shape up or ship out. Worse yet, he ordered Hitchcock to develop a musical based on the life of music hall composer Leslie Stuart, best known for his turn-of-the-century hit
Floradora.
That was the sort of English picture that English audiences would flock to see, Woolf declared.
In the meantime, Hitchcock had been desperately trying to reach Michael Balcon; now his emergency telegrams finally got through—fortunately in time for Balcon to overrule Woolf. Such postproduction interference would never happen again, Balcon vowed—a promise he kept as long as he remained in charge at Gaumont.
The Man Who Knew Too Much
was then scheduled for release, and
The 39 Steps
was allowed to proceed. The Hitchcocks took Bennett and Joan Harrison with them to St. Moritz at Christmas to work on the script and take a much-needed holiday.
The Man Who Knew Too Much
chalked up incomparable reviews in London (“glorious melodrama,” raved the
Kinematograph Weekly
, “artless fiction, staged on a spectacular scale”) and went on to tremendous popularity in England. Not only that: it became the first Hitchcock film to score with critics—and audiences—in the United States. Wherever it played in the world, people saw a film as enthralling as any other made in 1934.
C. M. Woolf never really relented where Hitchcock was concerned. The rental magnate insisted on booking
The Man Who Knew Too Much
into
his own chain as the lower half of double bills headed by routine Hollywood first features. Although the Hitchcock picture “broke attendance records for almost every theater it played,” in Montagu’s words, its percentage of the take was assigned to the first feature, and thus it earned only nominal fees. Woolf, who saw Hitchcock as a loser with audiences, recorded his film as a loser too.
A “B” movie in Hollywood budget terms—its entire cost was roughly forty thousand pounds—
The Man Who Knew Too Much
made a relative fortune over the years, and still plays widely in museums, in repertory, and on television. But in the short term, the experience finally taught Hitchcock the dangers of relying on a system so dependent on its distributors. Woolf could be kept at bay only so long. Early in 1935, Hitchcock resumed his flirtation with the Joyce-Selznick office, asking its London representative, Harry Ham, if he would again sound out American studios. This move was short-circuited, however, when Balcon found out about it, and warned Ham that Hitchcock had a Gaumont contract. Having just defended Hitchcock against a big investor, Balcon had no intentions of loaning him out.
The Man Who Knew Too Much
was hailed by English critics as a fresh Hitchcock varietal, a politically urgent blend of comedy and suspense that minimized his usual aesthetic experimentation in favor of sweepingly entertaining set pieces. “At last he has thrown critics and intellectuals overboard with one of his incomparable rude gestures,” declared C. A. Lejeune in the
Observer
, “and gone in for making pictures for the people.”
It was true: at each stage of his career, he excelled at creating variations on familiar, favorite ideas. Before
The Man Who Knew Too Much
, spy-saboteur pictures weren’t really Hitchcock’s specialty. Now, suddenly, he discovered that they fit him like a second skin—and
The 39 Steps
, based on a John Buchan novel that dated back to World War I, gave him a chance to explore the genre further.
Hitchcock often commented that in his youth he had devoured the books of Buchan, the Scottish barrister and highly regarded author known for his adventures with debonair gentleman heroes. Buchan liked to refer to his novels as “shockers”—a word Herbert Marshall uses in
Murder!
to describe one of his crime plays, and a word Hitchcock adopted in interviews to characterize his own films. Hitchcock said that he identified with Buchan’s “understatement of highly dramatic ideas,” and told François Truffaut that “Buchan was a strong influence a long time before I undertook
The 39 Steps.
”
In truth Hitchcock was probably fonder of
Greenmantle
, the sequel to
The Thirty-nine Steps
, which follows lead character Richard Hannay on a
secret mission during World War I.
*
Hitchcock and Charles Bennett talked about adapting
Greenmantle
before opting for
The Thirty-nine Steps
, partly for practical reasons.
The Thirty-nine Steps
was a “smaller subject,” in Hitchcock’s words, set entirely in England, while
Greenmantle
would have called for German and Turkish scenes.
The Thirty-nine Steps
, in contrast, could be shot almost entirely at Lime Grove.
But Buchan’s book, a thriller in 1915, was quaint by the 1930s—full of coincidences and uncinematic elements, as Hitchcock realized when he reread it for the project. “When I did so,” he said later, “I received a shock. I had learned a lot about filmmaking in the fifteen-odd years that had elapsed” since his first reading. “Though I could still see the reason for my first enthusiasm—the book was full of action—I found that the story as it stood was not in the least suitable for the screen.” He and Bennett launched a new treatment during the filming of
The Man Who Knew Too Much
, and then finished the first draft in the winter of 1934–35.
If any film supports Hitchcock’s typical boast, that when he selected a book he felt free to extract what he pleased and throw out the rest, it was this alleged favorite, a book he insisted he loved—and which he transformed into arguably the grandest of his Gaumont films.
He reshaped
The Thirty-nine Steps
into a Hitchcock film that bore scant similarity to the book. The story was updated, and turned into a romance. Buchan scenes were dropped, Hitchcock scenes inserted. As usual, the director added not only major elements to the plot and characters, but many smaller, delightful touches throughout. Once again, work on the script was divided between the studio and Cromwell Road. Once again, though Alma and Charles Bennett were the main writers, an informal group congregated to help out with ideas, borrowing from other films, books, newspapers—whatever was handy.
Novelists never claimed the same control over film adaptations as playwrights—and Hitchcock was through with plays, for the time being. The West End was in its worst slump, so there was less available material anyway; but more to the point, Hitchcock had more power now, and he preferred the freedom of working with novels.
The differences between the book and film began with a subtlety in the meaning of the title. The “Thirty-nine Steps” of the novel refers to a flight of steps leading down to the sea from the headquarters of the German spy organization; in the film there are no such steps, and the title signifies the organization itself—“conducting information on behalf of foreign spies.”
Buchan’s “double chase” concerns a wronged man fleeing from police
while racing against time to foil a foreign conspiracy; that much, at least, was carried over from the book. Remarkably, however, Buchan’s novel is entirely devoid of a love story—indeed, of any character even faintly resembling Pamela (Madeleine Carroll). Pamela was Hitchcock’s vital addition to the film: a train passenger who first betrays Hannay to the police, and then, when coincidence forces her to join him on the run, handcuffed together, falls in love with him.
Two of the film’s most famous sequences were also original: the haunting interlude on an isolated farm with Hannay given shelter by a suspicious crofter (tenant farmer) and his fetching young wife; and the music hall finale, where Mr. Memory—on point of honor—spurs his own death by reciting the secret of “The 39 Steps.”
John Russell Taylor said the crofter scene was consciously derived from “a slightly risqué story about a lustful wife, a watchful husband, a traveler and a chicken pie.” In at least one interview the director referred to another inspiration, a novel about an authoritarian South African Boer, his young, sex-starved wife, and a handsome overseer who comes between them—Claude and Alice Askew’s
The Shulamite.
Hitchcock often worked just this way, borrowing from two or more references, then patching the related ideas together and blending the whole into something wholly new, leaving only a hint of the original inspiration.
Charles Bennett insisted in later interviews that it was he who thought of Mr. Memory—the man “doomed by his sense of duty,” in Hitchcock’s words. But Mr. Memory had a real-life counterpart, an entertainer named Datas, a.k.a the Memory Man, well known in England for his mnemonic performances—and well-known to Hitchcock, who fondly recalled seeing his performances as a boy. “He always concluded his act by having a stooge ask when Good Friday fell on a Tuesday,” he recalled. “He would then answer that a horse called Good Friday fell in a particular race on Tuesday, June 2, 1874.” The Cromwell Road group passed around a copy of Datas’s autobiography, and there on page 202 was the famous capper from his act—which in turn inspired Mr. Memory’s climactic utterance in the film.
*
Whoever thought of an idea, of course, in the end it was Hitchcock who chose whether to use it in the film. Bennett’s job was to link up the
Plotto
-pieces, write it all down, and turn in a coherent draft. Then—in what was now an established Hitchcock tradition—came other writers to help polish the diamond.
On
The 39 Steps
, only one other was credited: Ian Hay (the pseudonym
of Ian Hay Beith). Hay was a well-regarded light humorist whose novels and plays wittily skewered English life. Odd characters and colorful dialogue were his forte. This was the first of three instances where Hay, who seemed to be friends with everyone (including Bennett), made the final emendations on a Hitchcock script before shooting.
Everybody heard about what happened when cameraman Curt Courant, told by Hitchcock exactly what size lens to use for a particular scene of
The Man Who Knew Too Much
, didn’t follow orders. When Hitchcock noticed the change in dailies, he was furious. “Applying his own opinions didn’t exactly meet the story requirements,” the director recalled. “So in a light but halting German I said a few things.”
The director wanted a more accommodating cameraman for
The 39 Steps.
He chose Bernard Knowles, whom he’d known as far back as 1923, when Knowles assisted Claude McDonnell on Graham Cutts’s
Flames of Passion.
A full-fledged cameraman since the late 1920s, with a reputation for fluidity and atmospheric lighting, Knowles would shoot
The 39 Steps, Secret Agent, Sabotage, Young and Innocent
, and (with Harry Stradling)
Jamaica Inn
for Hitchcock.
Hugh Stewart had moved on, so Hitchcock found another young studio editor, Derek N. Twist. (He, too, would later become a prominent director and producer.)
The casting was Hitchcockian all the way: The director chose Berlin-born Lucie Mannheim to play the exotic spy who attaches herself to Hannay during the ruckus and gunfire at the music hall, at the start of the film. Hannay scoffs at her tale of a secret network of foreign agents, until she is (rather implausibly) knifed by an assassin in his flat in the middle of the night. Hitchcock’s generation could appreciate the subtext: Mannheim had been a prominent actress-director in Germany, and playing a character bent on saving England was her first job since fleeing Hitler;
The 39 Steps
launched a second career for Mannheim in English film.
Onetime matinee idol Godfrey Tearle, who had played Romeo in a silent film, was countercast as the sinister spy chief of
The 39 Steps
, who “can look like a hundred men” but cannot disguise the missing “top joint of his little finger.” Wylie Watson was the unerring Mr. Memory. John Laurie was cast as the Scottish crofter, while Peggy Ashcroft, appearing nightly as Juliet opposite John Gielgud in Gielgud’s production of
Romeo and Juliet
, accepted a rare screen role as the crofter’s wife. Hitchcock “attended all her major stage performances and admired her boundlessly,” according to her biographer, Garry O’Connor.
All along Hitchcock had envisioned a certain actor as the embodiment of John Buchan’s gentleman adventurers. He had seen the handsome, magnetic
Robert Donat onstage in Shaw’s
Saint Joan
, in which he played Dunois, and in James Bridie’s
The Sleeping Clergyman
, in which Donat famously acted a dual lead: a tubercular medical student and a doctor hero; and he had noticed the actor’s “queer combination of determination and uncertainty.” Recently, while under contract to Alexander Korda, Donat had made screen inroads in
The Private Life of Henry VIII
, which had been an unprecedented U.S. success for a British film, and then done well in Hollywood in
The Count of Monte Cristo.
After making arrangements with Korda and Donat, Hitchcock looked around for a leading lady who might rival Donat in the looks and charm departments. His first choice was Jane Baxter, a genteel German-born English actress who had just finished making
The Constant Nymph.
But Baxter had made a “verbal promise” to appear in a play whose production dates clashed with the film; so Hitchcock thought next of Madeleine Carroll.
Carroll’s acting expertise had been questioned by some critics, but her cool blond beauty—Hitchcock, with his “precise sarcasm,” noted Ivor Montagu, described the actress’s appearance as “glossy”—had made her one of England’s top box-office attractions. The director had known her since the late 1920s, when Carroll was an up-and-comer playing smallish parts in lesser B.I.P. pictures, shot on the other side of the wall from Hitchcock’s major productions. In person, he knew Carroll to have “a great deal of joie de vivre,” in his words; she was amusing and unaffected. On-screen, though, her persona was icy, forbidding. When Carroll came in for a meeting, Hitchcock pointed out the discrepancy and gave her one of his favorite bits of acting advice: Be her natural self. (It was sensible advice, of course, but it often mystified actors: where was the acting in being yourself?)