Review of 39 Steps, The

Introduction

Alfred Hitchcock needs no introduction - he was one of the greatest filmmakers in cinema history and many of his movies are timeless classics, which are still very popular years after they were made - a testament to his unmatched ability.

The 39 Steps is one of his earlier movies, made before he moved to Hollywood, and is regarded as one of his best movies - praise indeed.

The movie centres on the pursuit of a man wrongly accused of murder, who heads for Scotland to discover the truth about the 39 Steps, along the way having to avoid the Police and even worse - the spies who committed the evil deed in the first place.

Video

Obviously a movie made in 1935 isn`t going to have comparable visual quality with modern digitally transferred movies, and The 39 Steps looks its age.

The full-frame picture is free of dirt most of the time, but pretty low resolution and quite grainy. The image is generally stable, but shows lightening at the left and right edges at times, along with the occasional flicker - the picture is also quite dark at times. This isn`t helped by two encoding errors that result in blocks being displayed on the screen, although my test disc did have a couple of small scratches that may have caused this.

As far as the visuals go, the movie was primarily made in a studio, which shows in a lot of the sequences, which rely on rear projection and clever camera angles. The movie contains the famous Forth Rail Bridge scene, which must have been stunning in 1935 (I drive over the Forth Road Bridge approximately once a week and it`s nice to see the rail bridge spanning the Forth alone, without the giant suspension road bridge in the background).

Audio

The sound comes in Dolby Digital Mono, replayed through the front stereo pair, and is just about adequate, with a great deal of hiss and limited range.

The dialogue is understandable, but the limited frequency range gives the voices the usual squeakiness at times.

Features

The only extra are biographies of Hitchcock, Donat and Carroll. I would have really liked to see a historical documentary about the movie, or even Hitchcock included.

The disc is packaged in a black Amaray case, which contains a four page leaflet detailing the 10 chapter breaks and some other classic DVDs that are available.

Conclusion

The 39 Steps is rightly a classic and still a gripping and thoroughly entertaining movie 66 years after it was made. The script is superb, with plenty of action, great banter between the leading characters, excellent performances and plenty of suspense and tension. Although most of is was made inside a studio, the dubious looking action sequences don`t at all detract from the proceedings due to the quality of the story and filmmaking. Similarly, a few continuity errors (such as McLennan`s shop appearing in both London and Scotland, or that you wouldn`t go over the Forth Rail Bridge on the Aberdeen train to get to Killin etc) and the poor video and sound quality don`t derail the movie either.

Overall this is a classic movie, and although the picture and sound aren`t very good, they are what you would expect from a 66 year old movie. Despite these shortcomings, this DVD is far more entertaining that most others I`ve watched recently.

I`ve marked the sound and video according to DVD Reviewer`s rating system - but please remember that this movie is 66 years old, and the quality is similar to any other movie of that age - so don`t let the low score put you off watching a classic. I`ve not seen the Region 1 Criterion Edition of this movie, which apparently had 21,000 scratches and dirt specs removed from the print, so I am unable to compare the video and sound to this Region 2 edition.