YMMV / The 39 Steps (1935)

• Ensemble Dark Horse: Mr. Memory only appears in two scenes, but is a key character, and, given his fate, even counts as The Woobie. Alfred Hitchcock himself cited him as one of his favorite characters in any of his movies.
• Germans Love David Hasselhoff: It was a huge hit in Canada in its initial release, presumably because they enjoyed having the hero identified as Canadian and appreciated the Shout-Out to Montreal and Winnipeg in Hannay's question for Mr. Memory, plus all the publicity surrounding John Buchan's recent appointment as Governor General of Canada. By contrast, in the US it was considered something of an Acclaimed Flop (though it did well in large cities, especially New York, which was the center of Hitchcock's American fandom in his British period).
• Once Original, Now Common: A lot of this film will seem overly familiar to a first time viewer. Not only did Alfred Hitchcock borrow a lot from it for his later films, but practically every action or suspense movie owes something to it. It pioneered a bunch of Escape Tropes, and had memorable early uses of Lost in a Crowd, Chained Heat/Chains of Love and Undercover as Lovers.

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