DONAT AS HANNAY.

Auckland Star, Volume LXVI, Issue 235, 4 October 1935, Page 3

DONAT AS HANNAY.

IN "THE THIRTY-NINE STEPS."

"I cannot help thinking," wrote the famous "London Observer' critic, Miss C. A. Lejeune, of the English film, "The Thirty-Nine Steps"—which is being given initial Auckland release at the Civic Theatre to-day—"that the choice of Robert Donat for the leading role was one of the British industry's happier inspirations. Mr. Donat, who has never been very well served in the cinema until now, suddenly blossoms out into a romantic comedian of no mean order. For the first time 011 our screens we have the British equivalent of a Clark Gable or a Ronald Colman playing in a purely national idiom. "Perhaps it would be as well to expjain from the start that 'The Thirty-Nine Steps' is not in the least faithful to John Buchan's story. The main plot remains and many of the individual situations; the setting is still, Scotland; the hero is still Richard Hannay, although a younger and a changed Richard Hannay. But Hitchcock felt that the story as it stood was dated with the tricks of its age, many of which have long since become banal in the cinema. For that reason the stricter conventionalities of melodrama were cut out from the start. A lighter romantic element was introduced, and the methoas of escape and detection were modernised. John Buchan himself has endorsed thy screen version, and by promising to write a Canadian sequel of the Hannay adventures for Hitchcock some time in the future, seems to have given both the film and the director his blessing."