I love this film, never get sick of it. It starts wonderfully with the excellent music hall sequence – plenty of laughs, quick dialogue and atmosphere (I love the squabbling couple and how everyone claps when Robert Donat says he’s from Canada). Then it goes sexy, with the female spy asking to go home with Hannay, and spooky, in Hannay’s dimly lit expressionism flat where he’s brought up to speed about some of the shenanigans going on, followed by the jolt of the spy’s murder.
The great scenes keep coming – the hilarious encounter with the milkman (an excellent example of comedy writing and playing); fleeing on the train; the funny brassiere salesmen (including an early example of Hitchcock POV paranoia); the chase on the train including the memorable encounter with Madeleine Carroll; the marvellous and touching scene between the farmer and his wife (so brilliantly performed, full of tension, humour, sadness and sexual attraction); another chase over the moors; accidentally stumbling into the lion’s den (I loved the wife of the baddie – “will Mr Hannay be joining us for dinner?”).
Maybe it’s a bit convenient to be saved by a bullet in the hymn book – a sort of deux ex machine rather than the hero ingenuity (in Buchan’s book, Hannay gets locked in a closet and blows his way out using his engineer experience) – but then they recover with the hilarious political meeting.
When Donat hooks up with Madeleine Carroll and they escape together, the action does slow down. There’s an extended sequence with the two of them in an inn, which is charming and sexy (love the handcuffs as she gets off her stocking). And although it’s a nice sense of completeness to have Mr Memory involved in the scheme, it does feel a little bit silly. (Just the bit where Memory nods to the baddy – that’s a bridge too far.) But I do love the ending with Memory expiring reciting the formula while dancers are in the background
Donat is a wonderful, charismatic star (he soon became a character actor star instead) – Hannay is Canadian, perhaps to make it more familiar to the American market. Carroll is also lovely and the support cast is excellent; one can only wish Geoffrey Teane’s part (he plays the head baddy) was bigger. Some of the female spy stuff is a bit laughable (the flashbacks). But marvellous entertainment whose ability to vault the years is demonstrated by its recent success as a stage play.
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