I was thankful that The 39 Steps was not actually a thriller, not in the later Hitchcock sense of the word. Of course it had many of his later elements, and much of his humor, and most notably: an otherwise anonymous woman opens her mouth to scream, and a train whistle blares forth, from the next shot. These are the sorts of tricks he revisits. And with everything tying together so nicely, and a nice implied love at the end, in my mind this film illustrates how Camus’ The Stranger could have been sweetly resolved. But so it goes, the difference between existentialists and everyone else.
arts & fetters 