Based on The Thirty-Nine Steps by John Buchan, this is the story of Richard Hannay (Robert Donat), a normal man who somehow gets caught up in the evil deeds of spies who call themselves The 39 Steps. They’re stealing British military secrets, and when he tries to stop them, he’s accused of killing an agent. Richard has to run to Scotland, where he meets Pamela (Madeleine Carroll), falls in love and works to prove his innocence.

Like many Hitchcock movies, this is about an innocent man on the run, trying to prove that he didn’t commit a crime. It also has one of the first of many Hitchcock blondes, of which Roger Ebert said, “The female characters in his films reflected the same qualities over and over again: They were blonde. They were icy and remote. They were imprisoned in costumes that subtly combined fashion with fetishism. They mesmerized the men, who often had physical or psychological handicaps. Sooner or later, every Hitchcock woman was humiliated.”

That said, while Pamela doesn’t believe Richard and thinks he must be a criminal, she comes to his side by the end of the movie. 

Back to the writer of the original story, John Buchan. The character of Hannay would appear in five more books, which made Ian Fleming a fan, who claimed, “Without him, there is no Bond.” Another fan is Holden Caulfield and his sister Phoebe. In The Catcher In the Rye, he remembers “Her favorite is The 39 Steps, though, with Robert Donat. She knows the whole goddam movie by heart, because I’ve taken her to see it about ten times. When old Donat comes up to this Scotch farmhouse, for instance, when he’s running away from the cops and all, Phoebe’ll say right out loud in the movie, right when the Scotch guy in the picture says it, “Can you eat the herring?” She knows all the talk by heart.”