Police Blotter

The 39 Steps (Rank; 20th Century-Fox) suggests that if few figures in the movie world can fill Alfred Hitchcock's trousers, fewer still are qualified to retrace his Steps. The 1935 Hitchcock version of The 39 Steps that starred Madeleine Carroll and the late Robert Donat was a sensitively controlled crescendo of excitement--perhaps the best .chase picture of its generation. The new version, directed by Britain's Ralph (Doctor in the House) Thomas, is simply a pleasant little comedy of murders.

The plot remains pretty much the same; both versions are based on the novel by the late John Buchan. The hero (Kenneth More), while strolling in Kensington Gardens, sees a nanny struck down by a hit-and-run driver and pursues her runaway pram. Instead of a baby he finds a gun inside. Next day the nanny, recovered from the accident, visits the hero's flat and announces herself as a British agent who has just about got the goods on a big international spy ring. But when the hero leaves the room to arrange a spot of tea, somebody sneaks in the window and scrags poor nanny. The hero chases the killers to Scotland and back, the police chase the hero, the killers chase the heroine (Taina Elg), and everybody catches everybody in a London music hall.

On the safe assumption that most moviegoers and or TV viewers have seen the Hitchcock original at least once. Director Thomas has played down the suspense, played up Scenarist Fred Harvey's daffy dialogue and laid on the De Luxe color with a heavy hand. The pace and direction are intelligently managed, and the only major problem arises in the major roles. Actress Elg. unlike her predecessor in the part, doesn't quite sustain the sex interest: she can't seem to decide whether she is supposed to look chased or chaste. And Actor More, with his usual cheery vacuity, continually suggests that in the main role of this movie a solid Donat has been replaced by a hole.

It Happened in Broad Daylight (Praesens-Film; Continental) is a cinema curiosity: a film that was later made into a novel. The script is the work of Switzerland's Friedrich Duerrenmatt, whose sinister morality plays (The Visit, Fools Are Passing Through) have been fascinating U.S. theater audiences in recent years. After writing the picture, Author Duerrenmatt rewrote it as a novel, published in the U.S. as The Pledge (TIME, March 30, 1959). Inevitably, people will say they liked the book better. It was a thoughtful study of the police mind and the one thing that destroys it: human feeling. In the movie, on the other hand, thanks partly to Director Ladislao Vajda, Duerrenmatt's Gothic involutions have been pressed as flat as the celluloid they lie on. Even so, the film has an original (if somewhat perverted) air about it, and works up an uncommon amount of suspense.

The hero is a cool, professional police inspector (Heinz Ruhmann) assigned to investigate the razor murder of an eight-year-old girl in the woods near a small Swiss town. When he breaks the news to her parents, he promises them, in a moment of rare emotional commitment, to bring the murderer to justice. Under pressure from the police, a peddler confesses to the crime, then hangs himself in his cell. But even though the case is officially closed, the inspector is not satisfied. Haunted by the memory of the butchered child and impelled, by his pledge to her parents, he sets off in obsessive pursuit of a killer who may or may not exist.

In the book the conclusion was richly ambiguous. In the film it is merely slick. So is the camera work; but some of the performances are better than that. Gert Frobe, who scored so impressively as a comic capitalist in Rosemary, creates with amazingly few gestures one of the most frightening psychopaths the screen has exhibited in recent years. And Actor Ruhmann, as the inspector, skillfully suggests that somewhere behind his wooden expression there are termites at work.

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