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Sunday Herald (05/Apr/2008) - Scattering shingle, I stagger along

(c) Sunday Herald (05/Apr/2008)

Scattering shingle, I stagger along

As a new digital print of Hitchcock's romantic thriller The 39 Steps is released, Allan Burnett retraces the tracks of its pursued hero in a journey that takes him from London to Glencoe between the door of my second-floor tenement flat and the street outside there are 39 steps. I noticed this last week, when I left home to begin researching Alfred Hitchcock's legendary romantic thriller, The 39 Steps. A ripping yarn about an ordinary fellow who gets mixed up with a murder, an international spy ring, a repressed crofter and an icy blonde in silk stockings, the 1935 movie is being re-released this week. At turns exhilarating, funny and dark, it is one of Hitchcock's finest: a cinematic landmark in which nothing is quite what it seems. This applies above all to the mysterious, titular staircase.

Having reached the foot of my own 39 steps and set off for London, where Hitchcock's story begins, my aim is to get to the bottom of the real thing. In part this means finding out the true significance of the phrase "the 39 steps". Mostly, however, it entails exploring the enduring appeal of the movie, based on the best-selling 1915 book by Scottish novelist John Buchan. My initial thought is that Buchan and Hitchcock must have come up with a storytelling secret formula. Since the seminal adaptation by Hitchcock, The 39 Steps has been filmed twice, in 1959 and 1978 - with a fourth version at an early script stage. If this remarkable success does rest on a formula, my mission is to find out what it is.

The search begins in a snowy London, at the Palladium on Argyll Street. Back in 1935 this is where Richard Hannay, hero of The 39 Steps, turns up after returning to England from Canada. As explained by Hitchcock biographer Tom Ryall, opening the story in the burlesque demi-monde of the music hall immediately plunges Hannay into a "chaos world" where anything seems possible. So when the audience turns rowdy and gunshots ring out, disorder reigns as everyone wonders whether it is all part of the act.

As he is spat out on to the street, Hannay is buttonholed by a fanciable woman who invites herself to his home in nearby Portland Place. Today a flat there will set you back a cool million. But back to 1935. The Germanic-sounding woman has just told our hero a remarkable story. It turns out she fired the shots, because some men in the crowd were out to get her. She is a freelance spy who has discovered British military secrets are being smuggled out of the country. Hannay learns that the plot involves a man who has lost a fingertip. She also mentions the phrase "The 39 Steps" but doesn't explain its meaning. A furtive check on the two blackguards watching his flat from the street below convinces Hannay she is the full shilling. During the night, she bursts into his room, warning him to escape before they get him, then collapses on his bed with a breadknife sticking out of her back.

From her dead hands Hannay pulls a piece of paper. It's a map of Scotland, specifically the southern Highlands. A spot near the village of Killin is circled in pen. Hannay realises his fate and that of the dead spy are now entwined. Until he finds out who killed her, he is the prime murder suspect. He must escape and find some answers. Who are the men lurking outside? Who is the man with the stub finger? And where, or what, are the 39 steps?

After giving the goons the slip, Hannay's quest inevitably draws him to the place on the map, a wild part of Scotland where a stranger will need his wits about him. But Hannay must be quick. If there is a spy ring smuggling secrets out of the country, and they suspect someone is on to them, they will try to leave these shores as swiftly as possible. On the other hand, the closer Hannay gets to the spies, the more likely they are to kill him. This dramatic ambivalence, where the hero is on the horns of a perilous dilemma, is another ingredient in Hitchcock's formula.

The train I board at King's Cross is not quite the old-world Flying Scotsman Hannay took, but at least the conductor is wearing a tie. I consider what we have learned. As with Buchan's book, Hitchcock has launched Hannay into a prototypical spy thriller. But Hannay is no Bond. In fact the spy ring and the enigma of the 39 steps are just narrative devices to plunge the everyman Hannay into a nightmare world where his real quest is much simpler: to prove his innocence and escape death.

Hitchcock had a term for devices like "the 39 steps" - details that seem central to the story but are in fact incidental to what the tale is really about. Hitchcock called such devices "MacGuffins". The MacGuffin comes to mind as my train powers north past York because Hitchcock liked to explain it with a joke about two men on a train to Scotland. The first man points to the second man's odd-shaped bag and asks what's inside. The second man replies: "It's a MacGuffin." The first man asks what a MacGuffin is. "A device for trapping lions in Scotland," says the second man. "But there are no lions in Scotland," the first man protests. "Well in that case," says the second man pointing to his luggage, "it's not a MacGuffin." The meaning of the joke? Don't take the story too literally. It's the interplay between the characters that matters, not the details of what's in a bag. Likewise, what keeps us with Hannay is not our desire to discover what is meant by "the 39 steps" but rather our voyeuristic compulsion to follow his emotional, psychological and physical journey towards redemption.

The train pulls into Edinburgh Waverley and Hannay spots newspaper headlines reporting "The Portland Place Murder". Hannay, played by the dashing Robert Donat, hops on and off the train as it lingers at the station, uncertain of what to do. Gripped on one hand by a sense of guilt that he was unable to help the murdered spy, Hitchcock's hero is desperate to turn himself in to the bobby on the platform in the hope he will be released from the nightmare. But he is pulled, on the other hand, by a sense of fear and dread. He can't give himself up now because nobody will believe him. So Hannay re-boards the train as it heads north and the pursuit continues, with suspense building like a head of steam as detectives appear on his tail, combing the carriages as they go.

As the hunters close in, Hannay, out of desperation, bursts in on a blonde beauty alone in a compartment and passionately kisses her. He pleads for her help, but she screams at the police passing outside to rescue her. It's another ingredient in the Hitchcock formula: a frisson of romance, a battle of the sexes. Wisely, I decide not to attempt a recreation. I would likely get my collar felt by the law, just as Hannay is about to, and - as an added 21st-century bonus - a female boot in the privates.

By this stage, I too am experiencing fear. Or make that mild apprehension. I am running a race against time to retrace Hannay's steps before my looming newspaper deadline falls. But there is also a greater dread: Hannay is about to make a life-threatening bid to escape his pursuers, who now have him cornered as the train thunders across the giant Forth Bridge. Hannay opens the compartment door and leaps onto the outer skin of the carriage, clinging on by his fingernails. The coppers think he's leaped onto the tracks and pull the alarm cord. When the locomotive shudders to a halt Hannay takes the chance to jump off and we next see him hiding behind a huge bridge section, out of sight of the constables. Then Hannay vanishes. So did he plunge into the icy water, 150ft below? Or carefully climb down the girders, his toes curling around every rivet? And am I going to test either of these alarming possibilities myself?

Scattering the shingle underfoot, I stagger along the shore, my eyes fixed on the awesome geometric structure directly above. Its towering legs remind me of another Hitchcock film: Vertigo. How the hell did Hannay get out of this jam, I wonder, as I try to picture myself jumping from the metal monolith. Yes, I'm afraid I bottled it. I got off at the next station and later returned to the bridge by car. After all, I'm not actually being chased, though I suspect my editor will be out to get me for failing to throw myself more fully into the action.

I try to regain a feel for Hannay's adventure by clambering over sea walls and piers. Make that a very slimy and barnacle-encrusted feel. If I were in Hannay's shoes, running for my life, then the pointing and laughing of a couple of ferrymen, or the langorous suspicions of a tabloid-reading white-van driver on the quayside, would be the least of my worries. Having enough in my pocket for a bus or taxi north would be of greater concern.

Again, Hitchcock doesn't waste time on the details. The director makes one of his trademark jumpcuts - and the story fast-forwards to the wilderness of the Scottish Highlands.

The biggest detail Hitchcock jettisons is Buchan's locating of Hannay's flight to the wilds of Galloway. Hitchcock prefers the deeper resonance of the Highlands. This arguably creates a more satisfying sense of Hannay being a fish out of water, an English gent in a landscape largely foreign to him. Here the director borrows from another Caledonian novelist, Walter Scott, whose hero Waverley makes the journey from English "civilisation" into Highland "wildness" set against an earlier conspiracy, the 1745 rebellion.

My journey, following military roads built during those Jacobite times, takes me to Glencoe. This sublime landscape of crags and waterfalls is where Hitchcock filmed Hannay's Highland adventure. One of the roads here is known as The Devil's Staircase. Does it have 39 steps, I wonder, as the rain lashes my car windscreen and the mountains become wrapped in cloud.

A crofter with a brow like the gathering storm greets Hannay upon his entry to this strange land. This is the darkest section of the film, though not without laughs. Hannay pretends to be a mechanic in search of work and a bed for the night. This strikes me as the worst choice of disguise. In Hannay's day cars have only been around for a couple of decades and we are in the middle of nowhere. Unsurprisingly, the crofter is suspicious and, equally unsurprisingly, informs "Mr Hammond" there is not enough of that sort of work to go around in these parts. I decide not to try replicating this exchange upon arrival at a nearby hostelry. After all, how would I capture a similar absurdity today? Tell the innkeeper I am a a passing astronaut looking for a space shuttle to service? Instead I order a coffee from the proprietor, a pleasant English woman. She hasn't seen anyone else all day.

Hannay's crofter turns out to be a dour, deceitful Calvinist, but is also more than a cliché, thanks to his genuinely menacing presence. Upon learning the truth about his mysterious lodger, the crofter tries to turn him in for a police reward. His young wife, on the other hand, is at first afraid of Hannay but then sees in him a kind, decent and attractive man - everything her pious husband is not. She saves Hannay from further peril by letting him out the back door with the symbolic gifts of a warm overcoat and a Holy Bible. "I'll never forget you for this, Margaret," he says with a kiss, fighting back the tears as he flees into the night. She is left alone to face her husband's angry fists. These scenes are among the most poignant in any Hitchcock, and the depth to which the human psyche is exposed comes as a surprise to anyone expecting a superficial "shocker", as Buchan described the genre.

Further escapades ensue as Hannay bumps into the woman from the train. She tries to turn him in again before eventually turning towards him. Played by Madeleine Carroll, she is the archetypal icy blonde with hidden passions that reappears often in later Hitchcocks. When the pair find themselves handcuffed together by the villainous spies, they are desperate to wriggle free and yet are falling in love. The template for a thousand romantic thrillers is being forged. That the comedy and chemistry is still fresh more than 70 years later is another reason why The 39 Steps keeps on going. Along the way Hannay confronts the mysterious, stub-fingered man and races to a spectacular denouement back in London where the true meaning of the 39 steps - completely different from that in Buchan's original novel - is revealed. So what do the 39 steps stand for? And what of the spies? Do they get away?

I won't spoil the ending. My own small mission is now accomplished; the appeal of The 39 Steps, if not the actual meaning, is a little clearer. The most important ingredient in the formula now seems apparent. Hitchcock and Buchan make you ask yourself, what would I do if I were Hannay, or his female foe turned accomplice? How would I react in a situation where my resourcefulness, bravery and humanity were the only things keeping what Buchan called "the thin protection of civilisation" from being ripped apart by a suicide bomber, a megalomaniac politician, or some such scoundrel? I have pondered this all the way back up to the door of my flat, where I now realise there are, in fact, 40 steps, if I count the landing. There is no significance in this detail; I still enjoyed the journey. Hitchcock, I hope, would have approved.

A new digital print of The 39 Steps is being screened twice daily at The Filmhouse, Edinburgh, from Friday April 11, to Thursday 17 April.

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