movie: 39 Steps

[meganbmoore]

The 39 Steps is a somewhat-absurd-at-times thriller from BBC that's set in 1914 and is, for the first half of the movie, basically about Rubert Penry-Jones looking quite sharp and dashing in his suits as he is chased through every scenic spot in England and Scotland after being given a spy's secret coded notebook and then being framed for the spy's murder..

Basically, his suit is immortal.  Jogging dozens of miles? Train smoke? Walking through rivers?  holing up overnight in a grimy shepherds cottage? Nary a loose thread or speck of dust.  Why, he even gets chased through the hills by a fighter plane with no ill effects to man or suit.  Even when he rolls down about 5 hills and lands in the road right in front of a car, the suit is fine.  He does get a twig in his hair though.

Sadly, the suit does eventually get blown up.  I mourned it.

About halfway through, Lydia Leonard shows up as a suffragette whose dress, sadly is not as impressive as the suit.  Her hairpins can do literally anything, though, and she's pretty good at scaling walls.

Later, she makes him wonder if he's the heroine of a gothic novel for a bit.

 

Eventually, we learn that she's actually a secret service agent who was sent to watch him while the government looked for the German spy ring, and the movie basically ends with him waiting for her until after the war because she's off on secret missions and such.  But not before he wonders if she's the spy for a bit.
 

The number  of twists and reveals are a bit absurd even if you like them and if you look too closely, you start to notice that a number of things (like, say, cars) are a decade or two out of place, but it's lots of fun.