The 39 Steps is a fascinating early film from Alfred Hitchcock, made five years before he left Britain to begin making films in America. It's a loose, free-spirited thriller, ragged around the edges, sloppily plotted, and often unevenly paced, but the director turns it into a near-masterpiece almost in spite of itself. Its subject is pure Hitchcock, an early stab at the kind of "wrong man" thrillers that would soon become his most characteristic works.
Ordinary businessman Richard Hannay (a suavely charming Robert Donat) stumbles into an international espionage plot when he brings home a mysterious foreign woman (Lucie Mannheim) after a vaudeville-style show. She's wearing a black lace veil and speaks with a sinister accent, so of course she turns out to be a mercenary spy, working for the British government to prevent some military secrets from leaving the country in the hands of an enemy spy (Godfrey Tearle). The only thing she manages to tell Hannay before she's abruptly murdered in the middle of the night is that the spy ring's leader is missing the tip of his pinky finger, and that she had planned to meet a man in a certain town in Scotland next. Hannay, quite naturally suspected of his guest's murder, flees towards Scotland with both the police and the spies on his tail.
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