The 39 Steps

Made at Gaumont-British in 1935, The 39 Steps belongs to the run of London thrillers in which Alfred Hitchcock perfected his craft before leaving for Hollywood. Loosely adapted from John Buchan's novel, it set out the chase structure he would return to for the rest of his career, an ordinary man wrongly accused and chased by two sets of pursuers, and the thriller as a form has been shaped by it ever since.

Robert Donat plays Richard Hannay with light, unflappable charm. Madeleine Carroll is the reluctant stranger he ends up handcuffed to, and their wary sparring runs a current of romantic comedy under the suspense. Hitchcock moves them from a crowded London music hall to the mist of the Scottish moors with a momentum that still feels modern, threading wit through the danger. The set pieces (a leap from a train on the Forth Bridge, a political meeting, a showman's uncanny memory act) turn plot mechanics into pure cinema.

It was a major success on both sides of the Atlantic and quickly became a template. You can trace it through Saboteur, North by Northwest and countless imitations, and it sits high on the BFI's roll of the greatest British films. It ranks among the finest of Hitchcock's English pictures and is the most purely entertaining of them, a brisk, sly lesson in how to seize an audience and keep it leaning forward.