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The Guardian (16/Jan/2004) - Stairway to Heaven

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Stairway to Heaven

John Buchan was ill in bed when he first had the idea for The Thirty-Nine Steps. "You and I have long cherished an affection for that elementary type of tale which Americans call the "dime novel," and which we know as "the shocker" - the romance where the incidents defy the probabilities, and march just inside the borders of the possible," he told his friend, Thomas Arthur Nelson. Writing his own "shocker", he added, was his way of passing the time as he lay convalescing in the winter of 1914.

Given Buchan's debt to US "dime" fiction, it's fitting that an American is now set to make a new screen adaptation of his ripping yarn. Robert Towne, the Oscar-winning writer of Chinatown and Mission: Impossible II, is the unlikely choice to direct the latest version of Buchan's novel.

"It's not much of an exaggeration to say that all contemporary escapism begins with The Thirty-Nine Steps," Towne declares. This sounds like wilful Hollywood hyperbole, but Towne has a point: James Bond, Simon Templar and countless other insouciant action heroes on screen and in books owe a very obvious debt to Buchan's Richard Hannay.

Even if Buchan was inspired by American prototypes, Hannay remains a distinctively British creation. He was reputedly partly modelled on Field Marshal Lord Ironside of Archangel, a master of disguise renowned for his derring-do in South Africa at the turn of the century. Intriguingly, Buchan's biographer Andrew Lownie speculates that Hannay might also be partly based on Lord Baden- Powell, the founder of the Boy Scout movement and a symbol of hoary old British imperialism.

Whatever else, Buchan's Hannay is the archetypal gentleman adventurer. When we first encounter him in The Thirty-Nine Steps, he is a 37-year-old mining engineer who has just returned to the "old country" after many years away in Africa. It is the summer of 1914 and he is "pretty well disgusted with life". He has a hankering for excitement and finds London enervating - "as flat as soda water which has been standing in the sun". When Scudder, an American from Kentucky, tells him a lot of "queer things" about a conspiracy to set Russia and Germany at loggerheads, he's rapt. He's even more intrigued by the revelation that Scudder is a British officer in disguise.

Scudder is soon murdered and Hannay resolves to find out why. "I am an ordinary sort of fellow, not braver than other people," he explains, "but I hate to see a good man down, and that long knife would not be the end of Scudder if I could play the game in his place." Thus the plot is set in motion.

The Thirty-Nine Steps rattles along at breakneck pace. Buchan's great trick is his deadpan approach to the most outlandish subject matter. Nothing daunts Richard Hannay. His understatement and laconic humour help iron over the many improbabilities in the plotting. What's bound to stick in the craw of most modern readers, however, is the casual anti-semitism that runs through the novel. Early on, Scudder tells Hannay that "the Jew-anarchists" are behind the plot to pit the Russians and the Germans against each other. He refers to "little white-faced Jews in bath chairs with eyes like rattlesnakes" as the men who are "ruling the world". Scudder may be paranoid and delusional, but Hannay doesn't show any sign of offence or even surprise at this warped analysis of world politics.

Unsurprisingly, none of the screen adaptations have included Scudder's ravings. "If we had tried to use Buchan's book literally, we would not have had a film at all. For one thing, it's thoroughly anti- semitic and no one would get away with that," Robert Powell admitted when he was starring as Hannay in 1978.

Hitchcock's version, by common consensus the best of the Thirty- Nine Steps films, excises not only the anti-semitic rants but also large chunks of the plot. The action is updated from 1914 to the mid- 1930s. Hannay is made into a Canadian. Hitchcock introduces a music- hall performer called Mr Memory who holds the key to the riddle of "the 39 steps". Throughout, he treats Buchan's thriller both as Boy's Own adventure and as battle-of-the-sexes comedy in the vein of the Myrna Loy/William Powell Thin Man films. Charles Bennett's screenplay abounds in the risque humour that Hitchcock so relished. There is no mention in Buchan's book, for example, of the two limerick-reciting salesmen on the way to Edinburgh to present the "new bodyline rubber panty corset". Nor is there any scene in which Hannay avoids detection by kissing a beautiful woman (Madeleine Carroll) he spots in an empty railway carriage.

The film cranks up the sexual tension wherever it can. Most notoriously, Hitchcock contrives to leave Donat handcuffed to Carroll on a wet night in the Scottish highlands (the first time he would ritually humiliate a glacial blonde onscreen.) The scene, Benny Green later recalled in the Daily Mirror, was "a source of considerable lecherous sentiment" to an entire generation of schoolboys, many of whom scurried out to buy or borrow Buchan novels. "Buchan got a reputation - which would surely have horrified him - of being a writer of hot stuff."

In the public's mind, Hitchcock's movie and Buchan's book have become as intimately entwined as Donat and Carroll in handcuffs on the moors. No subsequent film-maker has been able to escape Hitchcock's shadow. When the Rank Organisation decided to make a second Thirty-Nine Steps in the late 1950s, its point of reference was the 1935 film as much as the 1915 novel. Unfortunately, Kenneth More was a tweedier and far less dashing Hannay than Robert Donat, while director Ralph Thomas (best known for his Doctor in the House comedies) treated the material in ho-hum and rather stolid fashion. "If you can forget the Buchan novel, you may find the film satisfactory in a second-rate way," concluded the Observer's CA Lejeune.

The 1978 version was even more harshly criticised. Set in 1914, it at least ended on a spectacular note, with Robert Powell's Hannay dangling, Harold Lloyd-style, from the arms of Big Ben, trying to stop a bomb killing the Greek prime minister in the House of Commons below.

The latest Thirty-Nine Steps has been gestating for a very long time. Back in the late 1990s, Warner Bros tried to make it. Now Carlton, which owns the underlying rights, has taken over the development duties. Towne has spent over five years trying to bring The Thirty-Nine Steps back to the screen. In writing his screenplay, he will be able to draw on the three earlier movies (all in Carlton's library) as well as Buchan's novel for inspiration. No one knows whether he is planning a present-day action-adventure along Mission: Impossible lines or a faithful adaptation set in the Edwardian era, but just as long as he doesn't turn Hannay into a Californian beach bum, the ITV bosses promise they will leave him to his own devices.

"I don't propose to tell him what to write or how to write it," Carlton International's chief executive Rupert Dilnott-Cooper says. "But clearly we are very mindful of the original . . . I am sure that anything he writes will be very respectful of the original work." Towne's script is due for delivery in the autumn. Whatever tack he takes, one prediction can be safely made: when people think of The Thirty-Nine Steps, the first image that springs to mind will still be of Madeleine Carroll and Robert Donat in handcuffs, on the run across the Scottish moors.

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