silver nitrate notes

Hitchcock's 39 Steps and the Handcuffed Run

18 mar 2013

Alfred Hitchcock directed The 39 Steps (1935) at Gaumont-British, in the middle of his English period. The cinematographer was Bernard Knowles (1900-1975), a British DP who had worked on Hitchcock's earlier The Man Who Knew Too Much (1934). The film is, structurally, the template Hitchcock would spend the rest of his career refining: an innocent man, wrongly accused, on the run through varied geography, forced into unexpected partnership with a woman who does not initially believe him.

The premise. Richard Hannay (Robert Donat), a Canadian in London, takes a woman home from a music hall. She is murdered in his flat. The police suspect him. He flees to Scotland, pursued by the real killers, to find the "39 steps," a spy ring whose secret he has been accidentally given. On a train he meets a woman (Madeleine Carroll) who does not believe him. They are eventually handcuffed together by a fake police officer. They escape. They spend a night in a Scottish inn as a supposed married couple.

Knowles's photography is conventional 1935 British studio work in the interior sequences. What is unusual is the Scottish exterior work, which Hitchcock insisted on shooting on actual moorland. The sequence in which Hannay crosses a desolate highland landscape, pursued by a small plane, is shot mostly in wide long shots. Knowles is working with difficult light; the Scottish sun is pale and low. He compensates by overexposing slightly and shooting his foreground heather at a slight angle to the light so that the grass picks up a silver edge. The effect, on screen, is that the landscape is slightly alien.

Donat and Carroll's chemistry was accidental. Hitchcock had never rehearsed a scene with them together before shooting began. The first day, he handcuffed them to each other during lunch and refused to unlock them, on the grounds that actors who had spent hours cuffed together would play the scene honestly. Carroll objected. Donat found it amusing. Both of them, on screen, play it right.

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sources
[1] Truffaut, François. Hitchcock/Truffaut. Simon & Schuster, rev. ed. 1983.
[2] Barr, Charles. English Hitchcock. Cameron & Hollis, 1999.
[3] Ryall, Tom. Alfred Hitchcock and the British Cinema. Croom Helm, 1986.
[4] McGilligan, Patrick. Alfred Hitchcock: A Life in Darkness and Light. Regan, 2003.