The 39 Steps

Richard Hannay, a Canadian visiting London, takes in a woman he meets at a music hall after she claims that assassins are after her. She is murdered in his flat that same night, and he becomes the chief suspect. Pursued by the police and shadowed by the foreign agents she had been tracking, he travels to Scotland to prove his innocence and to finish the work she had begun.

Alfred Hitchcock directed this adaptation of John Buchan's novel, the seventh of the forty-three films he directed in chronological order, following The Man Who Knew Too Much and preceding Secret Agent. Michael Balcon produced it for Gaumont-British Picture Corporation. Robert Donat plays Hannay opposite Madeleine Carroll as Pamela, with Lucie Mannheim as Annabella Smith and Godfrey Tearle as Professor Jordan; Peggy Ashcroft and John Laurie appear as a crofter's wife and her husband. The credited cast numbers thirty-two, and the film runs eighty-six minutes.

The film stands out among Hitchcock's British work by the strength of its reception. Its critics' rating of 9.1/10 from fifty-five reviews sits well above the audience scores of 7.6/10 on IMDb from around sixty-six thousand votes and 7.3/10 on TMDB from roughly a thousand votes, a gap that indicates the regard in which it is held by professional reviewers relative to its general viewers.