PhilPaine.com

This is a film clas­sic that holds up rather well. John Buchan’s spy thriller, pub­lished in 1915, formed the tem­plate for hun­dreds of future sto­ries. It cer­tain­ly pro­vid­ed the for­mu­la that Hitch­cock repeat­ed in many of his films: an inno­cent man, ordi­nary enough, but cheer­ful, resource­ful, and mod­est­ly brave, acci­den­tal­ly gets entan­gled in a com­pli­cat­ed espi­onage scheme, gets framed for mur­der, goes on the run, and has to foil the spies to clear his name. The chase takes him across coun­try, a pil­grim’s progress through a sequence of encoun­ters with com­i­cal and sin­is­ter char­ac­ters, and finds love along the way. Hitch­cock made exact­ly the film again in Sabo­teur and North By North­west. Robert Donat played this kind of hero to per­fec­tion, so charm­ing­ly that you for­get the famil­iar­i­ty of the plot. Hitch­cock moved the sto­ry up from 1915 to the time of film­ing, and made the hero, for some rea­son, a Cana­di­an, but the for­mu­la works in any time or place.