Full of suspense and humor, the film follows Richard Hannay, the innocent man with a murder charge on his head (a favorite Hitchcock trope, this time played by Robert Donat), who is unwillingly drawn into a spy chase.
The 1935 thriller The 39 Steps is arguably Hitchcock’s first true classic. Full of suspense and humor, the film follows Richard Hannay, the innocent man with a murder charge on his head (a favorite Hitchcock trope, this time played by Robert Donat), who is unwillingly drawn into a spy chase. With The 39 Steps, the director popularized his celebrated plot device of MacGuffins (in this case some otherwise incidental military secrets), which drive the movie but are actually unimportant and irrelevant.