Word: hitchcocked
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Dial M for Murder (Warner) started out in 1952 as a British television drama, moved on to long, successful runs on the London stage and Broadway, and has now been made into a first-rate movie. Director Alfred Hitchcock, by shooting the film in three-dimensional WarnerColor, avoids the static quality common to many stage plays when transferred to the screen. The 3-D is used not so much for its shock value as to bring alive for moviegoers much of the theater's intimacy and depth of movement...
...films, regardless of their artistic value, seem fresh and undated ten or fifteen years after their release. The 39 Steps is one that escapes the outmoding action of time. No new techniques applied to more recent pictures makes The 39 Steps "old" by comparison. Alfred Hitchcock was in 1935, as he is now, the master of the suspense movie, and his methods have been improved...
...Hitchcock's success lies in his ability to subtly interweave two worlds. In The 39 Steps the mysterious and ominous world of spies is left half explicit, and is always connected with and expressed through the real world of buses, telephones and ordinary people. The movie creates an everyday reality the audience knows. It then allows something foreign, unusual, horrible to enter that reality, but the horrible is never tangible, never fully explained. The audience is allowed an impression of something alien and frightening, and that something is never clearly defined...
Touches of this sort fill the movie. Salesmen discuss the mysterious murder in the same breath with routine conversation about their product. A line of dancers at the Palladium goes through its act while a man lies dying. Always, terror intrudes in normal circumstances; this is the essence of Hitchcock's technique, and with the steady acting of Robert Donat and Madeleine Carroll plus fine photography, this essence makes The 39 Steps a memorable film event...
...buddies up to one spy he might run down a lot of others. Well, cars full of sincere-looking extras-Scotland Yard men, who resent McCrea's interference-roar in pursuit, and platoons of snaky-looking loungers, the agents of "a foreign power," lie in wait. Alfred Hitchcock might have zipped his man through them all as niftily as a gamma ray through a cream puff, but Hero McCrea has no such luck. The Yard men catch him, the loungers snatch his spy. The poor colonel is lucky to get a kiss from his wife...