Why the 1959 remake of The 39 Steps struggled to escape Hitchcock’s long shadow
In short: When director Ralph Thomas remade the classic thriller The 39 Steps in 1959, he faced an impossible task: competing with Alfred Hitchcock’s legendary 1935 original. Despite a charismatic lead performance by Kenneth More, the film was often dismissed as an inferior, less suspenseful attempt to capture a lightning-in-a-bottle masterpiece.
The 1959 production of The 39 Steps was a deliberate exercise in corporate necessity. The Rank Organisation, which owned the rights to Hitchcock’s black-and-white adaptation, tasked director Ralph Thomas with a remake. Thomas, who was under contract, famously consulted Hitchcock himself, who encouraged him to proceed while bluntly noting that the new version would not match his own. Thomas later reflected on the project as an act of "effrontery" that he ultimately regretted, acknowledging that his attempt to blend the sinister with the comic did not consistently succeed.
The film attempted to modernize John Buchan’s 1915 novel by shifting the setting to 1959 and introducing a contemporary espionage plot involving a British ballistic missile project called Boomerang. While it featured the first colour cinematography for the story and extensive location shooting across Scotland—including the Forth Bridge and various sites in Stirling and Perthshire—it relied heavily on the structure of the 1935 film. Iconic set pieces, such as the music hall opening and the train escape, were directly inherited, leaving critics to argue that the film suffered from being too similar to its predecessor while lacking its taut, suspenseful pacing.
Kenneth More’s portrayal of Richard Hannay was central to the film’s distinct, albeit divisive, tone. Critics of the era described his performance as having a "tweedy casualness" and "dare-devil insouciance," which leaned more into hearty comedy than the high-stakes tension expected of a thriller. While the film was the sixth most popular at the British box office in 1959, modern reappraisals suggest its value lies less in its thrills and more as a historical artifact—a window into the visual style and cultural atmosphere of late 1950s Britain.
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- Summary by Intellect · source: The 39 Steps (1959 film)
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