Richard Hannay is a Canadian in London who comes to the aid of a mysterious woman who tells him she is a spy with assassins on her trail. When she turns up dead next morning in his flat, both the killers and the police are after Hannay. He goes on the lam to Scotland to try to meet her contact and find the only way to clear his name ...
In many ways this is the most important film Hitchcock ever made; the one that shaped his illustrious career in Hollywood, his best British movie and one of the very best films of the thirties. Almost every key ingredient of his thrillers surfaces here - the double-hunt structure, the ice-cool blonde unwillingly tied to the put-upon-yet-chipper hero, the suave society villain, a classic McGuffin, red-herring comedy sequences, bungling coppers, a suspenseful scene on a national monument (in this case the Forth Railway Bridge outside Edinburgh), and most of all, an inimitable combination of thriller intrigue, sexual frisson and absurdist humour. It was a revisionary film when it was made, reinventing Hitch's slightly stodgy crime-thrillers like Blackmail and Murder! into what would become To Catch A Thief and North By Northwest, and was a runaway success. Donat is absolutely magnificent as Hannay - the definitive mannered hero - cool and physical, but also sharp as a tack (when his pretend-police kidnappers run into a herd of a sheep, he quips, "It's a whole flock of detectives !"), and is given great support by the whole cast, especially Mannheim as the furtive Miss Smith and Ashcroft and Laurie as the crofter couple ("Will ye no come in ?"). The Scottish locations are wonderfully bleak - it was filmed in Glencoe, quite close to where it's set, a profligate luxury at the time, and the photography is tremendous, with Hitchcock employing his endless gift for stylish touches, such as the moment when a woman's scream dissolves into a steam train's whistle. It's based on a great book by John Buchan - a larger than life character himself, who was Scottish and who went on to be Governor General of Canada - who wrote four other novels featuring Hannay (who is South African in the books), and is a terrific clattering tale of spies, murder, chases and state-secrets. What Hitchcock and his writers did was take a great story and make it even better, by adding all the humour (Mr Memory and the music-hall scenes) and the romantic high-jinks (there are no women in the book). The end result is a crackerjack thriller that entertains and amuses from start to finish. A must see, and look fast for Hitch's cameo as a litterbug. Remade competently but unnecessarily twice, once in 1959 with Kenneth More, and again in 1978 with Robert Powell.
In many ways this is the most important film Hitchcock ever made; the one that shaped his illustrious career in Hollywood, his best British movie and one of the very best films of the thirties. Almost every key ingredient of his thrillers surfaces here - the double-hunt structure, the ice-cool blonde unwillingly tied to the put-upon-yet-chipper hero, the suave society villain, a classic McGuffin, red-herring comedy sequences, bungling coppers, a suspenseful scene on a national monument (in this case the Forth Railway Bridge outside Edinburgh), and most of all, an inimitable combination of thriller intrigue, sexual frisson and absurdist humour. It was a revisionary film when it was made, reinventing Hitch's slightly stodgy crime-thrillers like Blackmail and Murder! into what would become To Catch A Thief and North By Northwest, and was a runaway success. Donat is absolutely magnificent as Hannay - the definitive mannered hero - cool and physical, but also sharp as a tack (when his pretend-police kidnappers run into a herd of a sheep, he quips, "It's a whole flock of detectives !"), and is given great support by the whole cast, especially Mannheim as the furtive Miss Smith and Ashcroft and Laurie as the crofter couple ("Will ye no come in ?"). The Scottish locations are wonderfully bleak - it was filmed in Glencoe, quite close to where it's set, a profligate luxury at the time, and the photography is tremendous, with Hitchcock employing his endless gift for stylish touches, such as the moment when a woman's scream dissolves into a steam train's whistle. It's based on a great book by John Buchan - a larger than life character himself, who was Scottish and who went on to be Governor General of Canada - who wrote four other novels featuring Hannay (who is South African in the books), and is a terrific clattering tale of spies, murder, chases and state-secrets. What Hitchcock and his writers did was take a great story and make it even better, by adding all the humour (Mr Memory and the music-hall scenes) and the romantic high-jinks (there are no women in the book). The end result is a crackerjack thriller that entertains and amuses from start to finish. A must see, and look fast for Hitch's cameo as a litterbug. Remade competently but unnecessarily twice, once in 1959 with Kenneth More, and again in 1978 with Robert Powell.