Alfred Hitchcock's "The 39 Steps"

Paper Summary:

This paper explains that Alfred Hitchcock's "The 39 Steps" (1935) reveals the themes for which he will soon be famous such as human complacency, disparity between appearance and reality, the salutary effect of a night journey, the difficulty of trust and the fear of confinement. The author points out that the narrative structure; the structural movements of complacency, crisis and recovery; the use of complacent and oblivious characters but not pessimistic character and a well developed model of life, alternating between confinement and release, in terms of physical but not so much in terms of psychological, confinement. The paper relates that the film is truly a Hitchcock film as demonstrated by his use of the Dutch tilt, stairways, extreme high angles and emerging body parts.

From the Paper:

"Hannay takes Annabelle to his flat and the two wind up in his kitchen where we will be introduced to the icon of the checkerboard floor, the complacent character type, the beginning of the typical structural movement, and the themes of complacency and of the disparity between appearance and reality. It is here that Annabelle reveals to she is a spy. Refusing to believe her, Hannay plays the role of the complacent character and thinks he knows everything about the world around him. This character type is in every Hitchcock movie and they are all punished for their complacency. These characters have the predictability of the world taken away from them, and they spend the rest of the movie trying to recover. Complacency is not always punished with physical danger."

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