Trivia / The 39 Steps (1935)

• Actor-Inspired Element: Madeleine Carroll was eager to play against type, and gave lots of input to Alfred Hitchcock and writer Charles Bennett as they expanded Pamela's character.
• Creator's Favorite Episode: Alfred Hitchcock always regarded this as one of his favorite movies.
• Creator-Preferred Adaptation: Maybe not preferred, but John Buchan liked the film despite the liberties it took with the novel. He particularly applauded the addition of Pamela as a character.
• The Danza: The Scottish crofter and his wife are named John and Margaret. They're played by John Laurie and Edith Margaret Emily "Peggy" Ashcroft.
• Enforced Method Acting: Before filming the scene where Robert Donat) and Madeleine Carroll run through the countryside, Alfred Hitchcock handcuffed them together and pretended for several hours to have lost the key in order to put them in the right frame of mind for such a situation.
• Fake Nationality: Brit Robert Donat as the Canadian Richard Hannay.
• Fake Scot: Some English actors playing Scots (though the main Scottish character, the farmer, was played by Scotsman John Laurie).
• Follow the Leader: In a lot of ways, this film is Alfred Hitchcock taking the novel of The Thirty-Nine Steps, then adding some elements of It Happened One Night, released one year earlier. In fact, in an interview at the time, Madeleine Carroll specifically compared Pamela to Claudette Colbert's character from the film, Ellie Andrews.
• Playing Against Type:
  • Madeleine Carroll, a specialist in playing refined, elegant women, as uptight, feisty Pamela, who becomes the Screwball Comedy foil for Richard, and takes on a Butt-Monkey role in the process.
  • Godfrey Tearle in a rare villain role as Professor Jordan. Earlier in his career he was a frequent romantic lead, and by 1935 he tended to play respectable pillars of English society. Years after this film he even played Franklin D. Roosevelt (in 1947's The Beginning or The End).
• Science Marches On: The secret being smuggled out is implied to be a silent bomber engine, useful at a time when the only means of detecting attacking bombers was acoustic location. As it happened though there really was a secret being protected at the time that would make such an invention obsolete — radar.
• What Could Have Been:
  • Hitchcock briefly considered following up the 1956 remake of The Man Who Knew Too Much with a remake of this film, but then learned that someone else beat him to the punch in putting the concept into development. Since North By Northwest is in many ways a loose remake, you can say Hitchcock didn't really drop the idea after all.
  • Hitchcock pursued adapting two of John Buchan's other Richard Hannay novels at various points. Greenmantle would've starred Cary Grant and Ingrid Bergman, while The Three Hostages, which he re-read in 1964, was going to be his response to James Bond (and possibly The Manchurian Candidate, with which it shares some common elements). In both cases he couldn't secure the rights to the books.
• Writing by the Seat of Your Pants: When filming began, the ending still hadn't been decided, and Pamela hadn't really been fleshed out as a character, so it was up to Hitchcock and writer Charles Bennett to work things out.

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