Another film about which I've written before. This is a film from the Japanese master director Yasujiro Ozu. This is one of several films he made that considers the transitional period in life where the child-parent relationship shifts as the child comes of age to marry and move out.

Here Huston crafts a fine noir-adjacent film out of a large cast without the characters becoming confused and keeps a heist simple and cracking along so that you're riding the edge of your seat waiting to see what comes next and brings the whole thing in under two hours. Modern directors would be well-served to take notes.

While the plot really isn't that important (the Marx Bros. are about the jokes, not the story), but the basic idea is that the four brothers all end up at a large weekend house party thrown by one of the ultra-rich. Hijinks ensue.

I wrote about this a year and a half ago or so for my series Movies You Might Have Missed. If you missed it then or want to revisit what I said you can click the link.

The 39 Steps feels like it must be an early Hitchcock work, particularly for anyone familiar with works produced decades later. After all, this is nearly 30 years before Psycho and 20 years before Rear Window, Vertigo, and North by Northwest. But no! Far from being one of his first, this is actually the 19th feature Hitchcock directed. After cutting his teeth on the earliest of talkies during the transition from silent films, one might say the film marks instead the beginnings of his long peak as one of the greatest directors of all time.