Derrick De Marney

A military base. An awkward soldier. A statue of Bach. And suddenly all guns in the area change into music instruments. Great mystery is immediately found by TV station. And soon the military base becomes a stage for huge TV show.Read More »

Synopsis:
Espionage agents Valya (Jean Kent) and Zurta (Albert Lieven) break into an embassy in Paris to steal a diary filled with crucial political secrets. The spies pass the diary on to accomplice Karl (Bonar Colleano) — who then double crosses them, fleeing on the Orient Express to sell it abroad. The agents go after Karl to regain the diary, and a police inspector pursues the agents — while on the train, an unfaithful couple, a writer and a bird-watcher become unwitting participants in the drama.Read More »

Synopsis: As early as 1937’s Young and Innocent, Alfred Hitchcock was beginning to repeat himself, but audiences didn’t mind so long as they were thoroughly entertaining-which they were, without fail. Derrick De Marney finds himself in a 39 Steps situation when he is wrongly accused of murder. While a fugitive from the law, De Marney is helped by heroine Nova Pilbeam, who three years earlier had played the adolescent kidnap victim in Hitchcock’s The Man Who Knew Too Much. The obligatory “fish out of water” scene, in which the principals are briefly slowed down by a banal everyday event, occurs during a child’s birthday party. The actual villain, whose identity is never in doubt (Hitchcock made thrillers, not mysteries) is played by George Curzon, who suffers from a twitching eye. Curzon’s revelation during an elaborate nightclub sequence is a Hitchcockian tour de force, the sort of virtuoso sequence taken for granted in these days of flexible cameras and computer enhancement, but which in 1937 took a great deal of time, patience and talent to pull off. — Hal EricksonRead More »