home
***
CD-ROM
|
disk
|
FTP
|
other
***
search
/
TIME: Almanac of the 20th Century
/
TIME, Almanac of the 20th Century.ISO
/
1930
/
30steps
< prev
next >
Wrap
Text File
|
1994-02-27
|
2KB
|
46 lines
<text>
<title>
(1930s) The Thirty-Nine Steps
</title>
<history>
TIME--The Weekly Newsmagazine--1930s Highlights
Movies
</history>
<article>
<source>Time Magazine</source>
<hdr>
The Thirty-Nine Steps
</hdr>
<body>
<p>(September 23, 1935)
</p>
<p> The Thirty-Nine Steps neatly converts its essential
implausibility into an asset by stressing the difficulties which
confront its hero when he tries to tell outsiders about the
predicament he is in. A young Canadian named Richard Hannay
(Robert Donat), he finds himself one evening, as the result of
nothing more daring than a visit to a London music hall,
entertaining in his flat a girl who tells him that she is a
counter-espionage agent protecting England from an international
ring which is selling the secrets of the Air Ministry and that
she has just committed a murder. Hannay considers this nonsense
until the next morning, when he finds his guest dying with a
knife in her back. Thus assured of her veracity, he constitutes
himself heir to her quest and with the meager information she
has given him sets out to solve the riddle of the Thirty-Nine
Steps.
</p>
<p> In the last two years, by making a specialty of melodrama,
the English cinema industry sometimes appears to have taken its
motto from the words of a song popular in the U.S.a year ago.
"Here Come the British with a Bang, Band." The Thirty-Nine Steps
is the most effective demonstration to date of Director Alfred
Hitchcock's method of artful understatement and its success,
which has already been sensational abroad, should be a lesson
to his Hollywood imitators. The film is an adaption of a novel
written 20 years ago by John Buchan.</p>
</body>
</article>
</text>