The Steps (39 ) Movie Review

Robert Donat, then 30, looks so hale and hearty in this key Alfred Hitchcock film, it's sad to realize that all his performances were a major triumph of mind over matter. A life-long sufferer of asthma, which finally killed him in 1958, the 1939 Oscar winner had to schedule movie roles around his delicate health. Donat is the quintessential Hitchcock hero: funny, charming, a bit of a flake, and completely unprepared for life as a fugitive. Splendid chemistry with beautiful Madeleine Carroll (1906–87) certainly helped, as did the exciting screenplay. Wylie Watson as Memory is to this one what May Whitty as Miss Froy is to The Lady Vanishes (only SHE gets more to do). The McGuffin is basically twaddle, but NO one is glued to a Hitchcock classic for the McGuffin; how he shows the way ordinary men and women behave in a crisis burns into our memory far longer than whatever set them spinning in the first place. Elizabeth Inglis (AKA Earl, Sigourney Weaver's mum) and Wilfrid Brambell (making his film debut at 23) are supposed to be in this one, but I've yet to do a frame-by-frame check to find them, or even to see Hitchcock himself in a street sequence.

1935 81m/B GB Robert Donat, Madeleine Carroll, Godfrey Tearle, Lucie Mannheim, Peggy Ashcroft, John Laurie, Wylie Watson, Helen Haye, Frank Cellier, Gus McNaughton, Jerry Verno, Peggy Simpson, Hilda Trevelyan, John Turnbull, Elizabeth Inglis, Wilfrid Brambell; D: Alfred Hitchcock; W: Charles Bennett, Alma Reville, Ian Hay; C: Bernard Knowles; M: Louis Levy. VHS, LV, 8mm