The 39 Steps, and The Man Who Knew Too Much

We had tentative plans to see two films tonight, but Subrata bailed on us (he's very busy at work lately - doing what, I don't know; most of what he works on is secret, and he's good about not telling anyone about it). I ended up going by myself.

Boy, parking in Palo Alto sucked tonight! Usually I can easily get a parking space in the garage near the theatre, but not tonight; instead I had to get a space six blocks away near where CJ used to live. Sheesh! I was five minutes late to the first film.

That first film was The 39 Steps (1935), one of Hitchcock's earliest films which is considered a classic. In it, everyman Richard Hannay (Robert Donat) meets secret agent Annabella Smith, who is promptly killed, but after telling Hannay that she's trying to prevent an enemy agent from smuggling information about a new airplane out of the country. Hannay feels duty-bound to follow through for her, but he's soon accused of her murder, and must escape the police in Scotland, where he meets a young woman named Pamela (Madeleine Carroll) who in several different circumstances he tries to convince to believe him, but she only feels that he must be the murderer he's publicly portrayed as.

The second feature was The Man Who Knew Too Much (1934), which I mainly wanted to see to compare with Hitchcock's own 1950s remake of the film, which will be showing at the end of March. This film also involves a secret agent who is killed early in the film. This time, he's the friend of the Lawrence family. He's shot while dancing with the wife, Jill (Edna Best), and gives her a tip to get something from his room to stop a spy ring. The husband, Bob (Leslie Banks), does this, but before he can contact the authorities with the information, his daughter Betty (Nova Pilbeam) is captured by the spies (whose chiefs are played by Peter Lorre and Frank Vosper), and he is warned not to say anything about what he knows or she will be killed. So he's forced into a situation of following up on the information himself to stop an assassination attempt and save his daughter.

Neither of these films is especially strong. As a friend of mine observed (having seen them before), the elements of Hitchcockian suspense are there, but they're pretty rough. The same can be said for the Hitchcock humor, which is played very broadly here, resulting in the surreal experience of sitting in a (packed!) theatre with peals of laughter ringing out all throughout a Hitchcock film.

The 39 Steps is the better of the two films, even though what we know of Annabella's plans before she is killed are pretty sketchy and hard to make sense of, given how things play out, and the revelation of how the information is to be smuggled out of the country is presented as a big deal, when it hadn't really been suggested that the how of the smuggling was of any import at all previously. Still, Donat and Carroll manage to squeeze a lot of life out of the script, and the film actually feels at times an awful lot like It Happened One Night, which had been released the year before (I suppose this actually makes it a pale imitation, as It Happened is a far better film).

The Man Who Knew Too Much is a more over-the-top film, with a fairly ridiculous shoot-out scene at the end, and many moments that make you wonder, "Isn't there something smarter the heroes can be doing at this juncture?" The acting is by-and-large pretty wooden, and although the resolution of the assassination is fairly clever, it's overall a disappointing film.

It will be interesting to see how Hitchcock's work really evolved over thirty years, as I watch these films. These two films are certainly much less sophisticated than his later work.