Movie review – “The Thirty Nine Steps” (1978) **1/2

20 years after Kenneth More’s Richard Hannay, Rank tried another version of John Buchan’s classic tale. This one stamps itself as different from the outset by actually being set in 1914, just before the war, like the novel, and instead of having a sexy female spy, it has an older man (although here he’s British, not American - John Mills). We go with Scudder for the first 10 minutes of the film as he investigates a series of assassinations (some committed by David Warner), until he introduces himself to his neighbour, Hannay (Robert Powell). Powell is an odd Hannay, with his gaunt look and curly hair – he doesn’t look how I’d imagine Hannay but he makes a decent feat of it. (It’s not a bad idea to have Hannay have worked in South West Africa, a German country, which makes him suspicious in police eyes.)

The relationship between Hannay and Scudder is as per the book – but Scudder’s murder is close to the UN murder in North by Northwest. Instead of Hannay taking off on the run, which would have kept the pace up, he finds himself taken into custody and thrown in gaol – then is busted out by the baddies, who are trying to find the notebook. The baddies then let him escape – which means half an hour in and Hannay has been fairly passive, swept up in events. But then he starts to become more active. He conks out a priest in a men’s room to use the priest’s clothes, something you can’t imagine Robert Donat or Kenneth More doing, then escapes on train and hangs out in the Scottish countryside.

Some good moments – the two henchman shooting at Hannay in the fields, the final climb on Big Ben – and Powell gets better as he goes on. Don Sharp’s direction is workmanlike rather than inspired, although you don’t notice the difference with Hitchcock as much as in the 1959 film because there are so many different scenes. Karen Dotrice is very pretty but her romance with Hannay is shamefully undeveloped – and it’s a bit yuck she’s got this perfectly decent, brave fiancée who gets shot trying to help for whom she seems to feel no sadness.

Too often the writer seems interested in draining excitement from the story – why have a scene half way in where the police realise that Hannay is innocent? Why have Dotrice instantly like him instead of wanting to put him in gaol? Why drag out the speaking to the crowd of strangers scene? Why not get a bit of conflict out of the fact Dotrice is helping with her fiancé? Why don’t the baddies kill him when they have the chance but instead drug him?

Buchan fans will enjoy some of the touches – the appearance of Sir Walter Bullivant, the fact the baddies and Hannay are into disguise, the last act which has Hannay and the cops trying to figure out what’s going on. The climax isn’t Buchan – it’s Hannay clambering over Big Ben trying to stop the hands reach 11:45 (good thing it wasn’t 11:15 or 11:30, he would have been stuffed).
But generally this is TV movie stuff rather than a feature, with its uninspired music and TV drama period detail. (Indeed, Sharp and Powell had just remade another classic, The Four Feathers, for television)