Film & TV Reviews

The 39 Steps (1959)

Alfred Hitchcock's 1935 classic The 39 Steps is one of his best films of the 1930s. It's also been a highly influential one, influencing not only Hitchcock's later films, but also those of just about anyone else who has made a thriller in this vein since.

British film, theatre and television have found it almost impossible to leave the story alone, so enamoured are they with the Hitchcock film. There have been an additional two film versions, one in 1959 and one in 1978, a TV film in 2008, and a popular tongue-in-cheek stage version in the 2000s. Although The Thirty-Nine Steps was originally a popular novel by John Buchan, most of the subsequent versions have patterned themselves more on Hitchcock's film than on the original book.
The 1959 film stars Kenneth More as Richard Hannay, the lead role played in the Hitchcock film by Robert Donat. Hannay is out for a pleasant stroll in Regent's Park in London one day when he runs into a nanny pushing a pram, supposedly w…

Death on the Nile (1978)

Following the success of the all-star murder mystery Murder on the Orient Express (1974), that film's producers, John Brabourne and Richard Goodwin, followed up with another lavish Agatha Christie adaptation, 1978's Death on the Nile.

As with Murder on the Orient Express, Death on the Nile assembles a group of mostly wealthy travellers taking part in an exotic journey, in this case a steam boat trip along the River Nile in Egypt in the 1930s. Among the passengers on board are a honeymooning couple, wealthy American heiress Linnet Ridgeway (Lois Chiles) and her new English husband Simon Doyle (Simon MacCorkindale), as well as the latter's jealous ex-fiancée Jacqueline (Mia Farrow), who appears to be stalking them wherever they go.

Linnet is later murdered while on board the boat, shot at close range with a pistol. Unfortunately for the murderer, the famous Belgian detective, Hercule Poirot (Peter Ustinov), is also on board. When he investigates, with the aid of an old asso…

Smokey and the Bandit (1977)

If I asked you to name the biggest film at the US box office in 1977, you might well guess (correctly) that it was Star Wars. But if I asked you to name the second biggest, you might struggle a little. Was it Close Encounters of the Third Kind ... or maybe the James Bond epic The Spy Who Loved Me? Nope. It was a cross-country car chase comedy called Smokey and the Bandit, a film as divorced from the era of modern blockbuster cinema as its box office rival Star Wars is inextricably linked to it.

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The 39 Steps (1959)

Death on the Nile (1978)

Smokey and the Bandit (1977)