Hitchcock was an inveterate theatre-goer while he was in England and for this film he picked two actors from the English stage. Ignoring the point of the pursuit allowed Hitchcock and Bennett to waste less time in explanation and focus more attention on humor, romance and the mounting suspense. This desire for taut narratives led to the invention of what Hitchcock would dub the "MacGuffin." Based on a Scottish anecdote, the MacGuffin is "the thing the spies are after" that is of vital importance to the characters but of no importance to the audience. Exactly how he managed this feat is never explained but with the film's speed there is never enough time to wonder. In another moment, the handcuffed hero smashes through a window in the police station and quickly joins a parade. A landlady discovers a woman's body and her scream becomes the whistle of a train speeding the hero away from the scene. Hitchcock and Bennett broke all the action into a series of set pieces, and then made the transitions between those scenes as rapid as possible. The resulting screenplay was a marvel of compression. By the time Hitchcock and his scriptwriter Charles Bennett were through the only details remaining from the novel were the chase from London to Scotland and back and the idea that the hero was pursued by the police while he chased the spies. For a follow-up Hitchcock and his producer Michael Balcon turned to the novel The Thirty-Nine Steps (1915) by the suspense author John Buchan. Selznick and linked Hitchcock's name forever with light, quickly paced, romantic thrillers.Īfter years in which Hitchcock had made thrillers only occasionally, Hitchcock had just produced a British hit with The Man Who Knew Too Much (1934), the story of an innocent family that gets involved with spies. It was as big a hit in America as in England, caught the attention of Hitchcock's future producer David O. Alfred Hitchcock had been a star director in England since his silent film The Lodger (1927) but for the rest of the world, Alfred Hitchcock's fame began with this movie, The 39 Steps (1935).
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