The 39 Steps
Dir: Ralph Thomas
1959
**
As much as I love Hitchcock's original, there was always room for improvement. Made 24 years after the original film based on John Buchan's novel, it had time to improve vastly, from the use of colour, the development of the cameras, camera trickery etc but they achieved quite the opposite, they took all that was right about the original and undid it. The changes in story were of no benefit at all to the overall feel of the film. The humour was even more displaced than the original, the acting was pretty shoddy and all of the various substitutes in the story distracted too much from the original. I'm very fond of Ralph Thomas's film but I think he found his feet with the Doctor films, if you want to see what I consider the best version of the story, then go to the Beautiful Crighton Theatre in London's Piccadilly Circus and go see the stage show, it's brilliant.