39 Steps – on Steam now! The 39 Steps (1935 film) The 39 Steps is a 1935 British thriller film directed by Alfred Hitchcock and starring Robert Donat and Madeleine Carroll.
Loosely based on the 1915 adventure novel The Thirty-Nine Steps by John Buchan, the film is about a man in London who tries to help a counter-espionage agent prevent an organisation of spies called The 39 Steps from stealing top secret information. When the agent is killed and he stands accused of the murder, he goes on the run with an attractive woman to save himself and stop the spy ring.
Of the four major film versions of the novel, Hitchcock's film has been the most acclaimed. The 39 Steps (1935. The Thirty-Nine Steps & John Buchan. The 39 Steps. Film locations for The Thirty-Nine Steps (1935) The Thirty-Nine Steps location: crossing the Firth of Forth: the Forth Rail Bridge, Scotland Photograph: iStockphoto © Iain King This early Alfred Hitchcock classic was shot almost entirely in the studio, at the old Lime Grove Studios, Shepherds Bush, demolished in the Nineties.
Richard Hannay (Robert Donat) supposedly lives at ‘122 Portland Place’, but the exterior was recreated in the studio, and the grand six-lane road is reduced to the width of a minor sidestreet. Hitchcock returned to Portland Place for The Paradine Case in 1947, and the street features again in Henry Hathaway’s 1956 glossy Hitchcockian thriller 23 Paces to Baker Street.