The 39 Steps (1935)
Directed by Alfred Hitchcock
Richard Hanney has a rude awakening when a glamorous female spy falls into his bed - with a knife in her back. Having a bit of trouble explaining it all to Scotland Yard, he heads for the hills of Scotland to try to clear his name by locating the spy ring known as The 39 Steps.
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What critics compared The 39 Steps to
Not that "Condor" is a "great" film by any means, but it is a competent, well-made one, patterned to some extent on the one-man-against-the-world theme found in some of Hitchcock's best films ("The 39 Steps," "North By Northwest").
Writers Lorenzo Semple, Jr. and David Rayfiel fill it with too much gloss and pilfer much from Hitchcock's "The 39 Steps," but when left to their own devices there's some intelligence evident in the clever dialogue and in the way they present the mundane details about a spook's life in such a cheeky way.
Interrogating a retired academic ( Tom Wilkinson , superb) reminiscent of Hitchcock 's tweedy professors in " The 39 Steps " and " North by Northwest ," McGregor's every attempt to unravel a decades-old political plot is checkmated by the kind of politesse that's hardened by an impenetrable, unflappable sense of self.
Mangold and co-writer Patrick O'Neill reference romantic-comedy twisters such as Hitchcock's The 39 Steps, Stanley Donen's Charade and Doug Liman's Mr. and Mrs. Smith.
Anderson names "The Lady Vanishes," "The 39 Steps," "Sabotage" and "Torn Curtain" as specific inspirations.
Maybe Robert Donat in The 39 Steps is a better comparison.
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And certain plot elements owe too much to early Hitchcock for the film to be considered a true original: the sequence in which Holly is forced to deliver an impromptu speech is entertaining as all hell, but its also lifted from The 39 Steps.
Whether Mendes is really trying to add grit and dimension to Bond’s story or just cramming in another cinematic reference – in this case, to Alfred Hitchcock’s espionage classic “The 39 Steps,” which is also about a Scottish manhunt – is debatable.
How about roughly every Hitchcock film you can think of, starting with "The 39 Steps"?
He is taunting Ethan, who is also bound (but not gagged) in the same room, threatening to kill her if Ethan doesn’t tell him how he can put his hands on a fearsome instrument of terror known as the “rabbit’s foot,” this movie’s equivalent of the by now overly familiar MacGuffin—though no one in any of Alfred Hitchcock’s movies ever actually used that term to describe, for example, the secret clause of a treaty in Foreign Correspondent (1940), or the plans for new weapons in The 39 Steps (1935) and North by Northwest (1959), or the nuclear materials in Notorious (1946).
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In "Eagle Eye" LaBeouf is once again a Hitchcockian archetype - the innocent man wrongly accused, as seen in "The 39 Steps" or "North by Northwest."
If Obsession is DePalma's Vertigo and Dressed to Kill is his Psycho, The Fury is his North by Northwest or The 39 Steps, eventually pairing a fugitive with an ironic femme fatale against power mongers in cross-country pursuit of a platonic symbol, though Robin comes to resemble nothing in Hitch so much as the lighted briefcase from Robert Aldrich's Kiss Me Deadly.