The 39 steps

Week 2: The 39 Steps

The 39 steps is another major Hitchcock’s suspense film filled with humor and witty conversations. The film is composed with exciting adventures one after another to make the audiences have a strong sense of tension and shock while watching this film, however, he demonstrated this film with a romantic relationship with Pamela with the adventures at the same time. At the very beginning of the film, it opens with a theater scene, this particular scene employed a lot of low angle shots (time stamp:02:43), as if the audiences are in the theater watching the show of the show in the film, because the angle that Hitchcock used was in the perception of the viewers, created the feeling of being dominated by the actors and what was coming later in the film. Another scene I thought was pretty funny and exciting was when Mr. Hannay was on the train trying to dodge the detectives (time stamp: 26:11), it was very intense because there are a few rather aggressive detectives looking for Mr Hannay, the close up shots of the detective’s faces revealed that they are determined to find him allows the viewers to be more nervous.  The space on the train where he could hide is relatively limited, the chance he could be caught by the detectives are very high,   in the search of Mr Hannay the detectives encountered feisty dogs barking crazy at them made the search more interesting and it was the scene where Mr. Hannay and Pamela met, they met in such awkward circumstances in a way foreshadowed that there is going to be some sort of romantic relationship between them as the story goes on.  This particular scene added funny elements in addition to the intensive adventure and also indicated that there is romance in the suspense, thus make this film not only about thrill and crime.