Cinema Progress (1935) - Behind the Screen: The Thirty-Nine Steps

Details

• article: Behind the Screen: The Thirty-Nine Steps
• journal: Cinema Progress (December 1935)
• issue: issue 1, page 24
• journal ISSN:
• publisher: American Institute of Cinematography
• keywords: Alfred Hitchcock, Robert Donat, The 39 Steps (1935)

Article

Robert Edmund Jones once said that screen stories should move as fast as your thought. In THIRTY-NINE STEPS, the director Alfred Hitchcock has used a method in keeping with the kind of story, a mystery spy melodrama. You are allowed to see a thing, or person only when the character you are accompanying sees it. As a consequence your reactions are the same as his. Robert Donat perceives the dagger in the back of the girl spy at the precise instant you do. Camera, players, speech, props are all directed toward this single objective.