Borgarkeri A bit overrated, but still an amazing film

Livestonth I am only giving this movie a 1 for the great cast, though I can't imagine what any of them were thinking. This movie was horrible

SanEat A film with more than the usual spoiler issues. Talking about it in any detail feels akin to handing you a gift-wrapped present and saying, "I hope you like it -- It's a thriller about a diabolical secret experiment."

Rio Hayward All of these films share one commonality, that being a kind of emotional center that humanizes a cast of monsters.

david-potter-861-39726 This is a good film, bringing up to date the previous Robert Donat version. Kenneth More, who seemed to appear in every British film I watched in the 1950s, is excellent as Richard Hannay. What I like about this film is the interlacing of humour as well as the sinister threatening of the enemy. The fact that we are never really told who the "enemy" is adds to the tension and the mystery, but the real strength lies in the humour - the impersonation of the whistling milk man, the handcuffing together of Hannay and Fisher, and the way that the landlady identifies with the "runaway couple" reminding "McDougal" of their own courting days. The climax in the theatre is a little unbelievable with the audience watching dancing girls minutes after the Memory Man has been shot, for example, and we are not told how Hannay and Fisher managed to get from Perthshire to London with every policeman in Great Britain after them! The authentic Scottish scenery, especially Waverley Station and the Forth Bridge, adds to the film. I first saw this film in about 1960; I have seen it about a dozen times since, and I keep enjoying it!

James Hitchcock Since Alfred Hitchcock's well-known version from 1935, there have been two further adaptations of John Buchan's "The 39 Steps". The 1978 version with Robert Powell kept the pre-World War I setting and was much more faithful to Buchan's plot than Hitchcock had been. The 1959 version, however, was a remake of Hitchcock's film, keeping much of the plot, and even some of the dialogue, of his version. (It came out in the same year as "North by Northwest", which can be seen as Hitchcock's own unacknowledged remake of his own film).Just as Hitchcock updated the story to the thirties, so this one updates it to the fifties. Modern audiences tend to assume that the villains in the Hitchcock film are agents of Nazi , although this is never made explicit and for thirties audiences Stalin's Russia might have suggested itself as an alternative possibility. In the 1959 film, made during the Cold War, there is little doubt that the villains are working for the Soviet Union, although again this is never explicitly stated.In this version the hero, Richard Hannay, is not a Canadian (as he was in Hitchcock's film) but an Englishman, recently returned from working in the Middle East. (In Buchan's novel he was a Scot who had worked in South Africa). He meets by chance a woman who reveals to him that she is a spy, working for British Intelligence, and has uncovered a plot by a mysterious organisation known as "The Thirty Nine Steps" to steal the top-secret plans for a new British ballistic missile. (In Hitchcock's version the secret information related to a new aircraft engine). She tells Hannay that she must leave for Scotland immediately, but while he is out of the room, she is killed by two hit men. Fearing he will be accused of her murder, he decides to continue her mission and catches a train to Scotland. The plot continues along much the same lines as Hitchcock's, although there are a few changes. The heroine whom Hannay meets on the train is, for example, a sports teacher at a girls' public school. There are also some added scenes, such as the one where Hannay stays at an inn whose landlady turns out to be a spiritualist medium.Hitchcock's film was a comedy-thriller which combined suspense with humour, and the remake was intended in the same vein. Ralph Thomas was known as a director of both comedies (such as the "Doctor" films) and thrillers (such as "The Clouded Yellow") so he doubtless seemed the right man for the job. Compared to the original, however, this film is a pedestrian affair. To be fair to Thomas, part of the blame lies with the actors. Kenneth More plays Hannay as the sort of decent, middle-class stiff-upper-lipped English gentleman which had become his stock-in-trade, a characterisation which seems stolid and uninteresting next to the panache of Robert Donat's dashing action hero. The casting of the Finnish actress Taina Elg as Miss Fisher was an unsuccessful attempt to inject some Continental glamour into the film. Elg always comes across as dull and unglamorous, especially when compared to Madeleine Carroll who played the equivalent role in the Hitchcock film, and her foreign accent makes it difficult to accept her as a British schoolmistress.Some of the blame for the film's comparative failure, however, must lie with the director and scriptwriters. Some of the scenes, such as Hannay's escape on the Forth railway bridge, are indeed better done here than they were in the original, which is perhaps not surprising given that Thomas evidently had more financial resources available to him than did Hitchcock. The film as a whole, however, lacks the sense of movement and excitement which characterised Hitchcock's. The attempts at humour generally fall flat. The scene with the milkman is mishandled; in the original the humour arises from the fact that the milkman refuses to believe the truth but readily believes Hannay's false story about being a lover escaping from a jealous husband. In the remake Hannay simply comes out with the invented story without any attempt to tell the true one. The other comic high point of Hitchcock's film, the scene at the political meeting, here becomes an attempt to give a lecture to the assembled schoolgirls, and loses much of its point.This is not a particularly bad film, and is certainly not the worst Hitchcock remake. (That dubious distinction must belong to Gus van Sant's horrible version of "Psycho"). Nevertheless, the filmmakers seem to have failed to realise that trying to improve on Hitchcock's version was a vain endeavour. Had they wanted to make a new version of "The 39 Steps" they should have gone back to Buchan, as the makers of the 1978 film did. 5/10

ed_two_o_nine I recorded this expecting the Hitchcock version, but ended up with this the 1950's version instead. So now I have seen three versions of this film and although not terrible unfortunately this is the worst of the three, though that is not to say this is a bad film. Kenneth Moore plays Richard Hannay here, the man framed for murder that leads to a desperate man hunt all tied in with the mysterious 'boomerang'. This version goes for a lighter more comedic touch but that does not stop the movie being fun, with some quaint set pieces and some proper British stiff upper lip bravado from Kenneth Moore. Enjoyable and worth another go.

Robert J. Maxwell A zippy and enjoyable version of John Buchan's novel, far lighter in tone that Hitchcock's. The versions differ in more than tone. In Hitchcock's film, Hannay undergoes different sorts of divagations and dangers than he does here, in Ralph Thomas's film. There's nothing wrong with that. Neither film is a close adaptation of Buchan's book. If I , Hanny has a heck of a long time getting from place to place in the novel, at one point having to take a job as a ditch digger.The color in the more recent film is easier on the eyes but adds a cheery note to the proceedings too, absent 1935's stark shadows. And there has been a good deal of location shooting in London and Scotland, so the one-lane gravel highland roads are no longer clogged with sheep and cloaked with fog, no longer so claustrophobic. Nor is Kenneth More what we usually think of as a brutishly dramatic actor. Like the earlier Robert Donat he seems like a rather likable guy, and there isn't a moment when we feel he's in fear for his life. Taina Elg has a plain-vanilla pretty face, suggestive of a high-school prom queen. This isn't an especially good thing, let's face facts. But her plump-lipped youthfulness, the hint of a Khalka Mongol in her Finnish eyes, and the fact that we know she is a ballerina adds a certain frisson of the exotic. What normal man wouldn't want to have a struggle with her in the back seat, as Kenneth More does? Thomas's film is not nearly as stark as Hitchcock's. It's almost sumptuous. Instead of that depressing encounter with the pecuniary Scottish farmer and his deprived wife, there is an abundance of Brenda de Banzie who, with the consent of her meek husband, offers Moore much more than a box bed and a meal of "the herring." And there is nothing like the scene between Anne Robinson and Robert Donat in Donat's first-floor flat, when she asks for something to eat and Donat prepares a huge slab of haddock in a frying pan. No veggies, no wine, no nothing. As he stands over the stove, Donat wears a heavy overcoat with its vast collar turned up around his ears, a cigarette in his mouth, the ashes perhaps filtering down into the frying fish. The place looks sterile, discomfiting, and cold as hell. More's flat, on the other hand, is colorfully decorated with alien objects from his travels around the world. The episode on the Forth Bridge is almost a duplicate of the original.In one scene, though, Thomas and his writers out-do Hitchcock and his. More, like Donat, accidentally stumbles onto a stage and is forced to improvise a speech. In the original, it involved some palaver about local politics. Here, it is a lecture on "Woods and Wayside" in a girls' school, with the emphasis on a plant called the spleenwort. More stumbles a bit at first, chuckling over his own ineptitude, then tells a joke about "a Scotsman, an Englishman, and an Irishman." We only get to hear the punch line that suggests the story was slightly off color. The girls must have loved it because they're all giggling. Then More really gets into his pitch. He once had a parrot, he claims, that was allergic to spleenwort. "You had only to open a spleenwort in front of him for him to show his disgust. And I think we can all agree that there is nothing less pleasant than a disgusted parrot." As he's dragged from the lectern, More shouts out a summary of his lecture -- "Please, girls, don't fall by the wayside. And above all, stay out of the woods!" I smiled at Donat's impromptu speech but I laughed out loud through More's.As I say, it's not nearly as dark as Hitchcock's vision. This is strictly a comedy with thriller undertones, rather than the other way around. You'll probably enjoy it.