Madeleine Carroll makes a leading man's charm meet sensible resistance. We value her most in The 39 Steps, where her poise gives the comedy its friction, even when the romance takes her agreement for granted.
Fi1m perspective
In The 39 Steps (1935), Robert Donat has charm to spare, and Madeleine Carroll's Pamela remains suspicious. Carroll does not make that suspicion look like a failure to understand the man in front of her. She gives Pamela enough sense for the mistrust to be credible, so the bickering is enjoyable without our having to find her foolish. We took particular pleasure in watching Donat fail to secure her immediate agreement, because Carroll gives her good reason to resist.
She had already made a substantial run of British films, including the drama I Was a Spy (1933), before Alfred Hitchcock brought her international prominence. Secret Agent (1936), their second film together, reinforced her association with cool, elegant heroines. That is the basis for her reputation as the prototype Hitchcock blonde, though the description can leave the acting out of the discussion. What matters in Pamela is the intelligence behind the composure: Carroll lets us understand why she might not accept what she is being told.
The handcuffs in The 39 Steps are an obvious way of keeping two people together; Hitchcock relies on the actors to make their company worth having. Donat and Carroll do that through disagreement, with his charm meeting resistance instead of automatic approval. The reservation is the romance, which assumes rather too much about what Pamela ought to feel. Carroll's performance makes that presumption harder to accept, since she has taken the trouble to make Pamela's judgement worth respecting.
Hollywood offered European romance in The Prisoner of Zenda (1937), with Carroll as Princess Flavia opposite Ronald Colman, and a western in North West Mounted Police (1940), alongside Gary Cooper. Her refined manner was well suited to the former kind of casting, though grace alone is a modest basis for praising an actor. We value the friction she brings to The 39 Steps more than the elegance of the type she helped establish. Start there, with a leading man who discovers that being charming does not settle the matter.
Biography
Madeleine Carroll was an English actress. Born Edith Madeleine Carroll in West Bromwich in 1906, she studied at the University of Birmingham and taught French before making her stage debut in London in 1927. Her first film role followed in 1928.
She played Pamela in Alfred Hitchcock's The 39 Steps (1935) and appeared in Secret Agent (1936), The Prisoner of Zenda (1937) and North West Mounted Police (1940). She was reported to be the world's highest-paid actress in 1938.
After the death of her sister in the London Blitz, Carroll largely withdrew from acting to work with the Red Cross assisting wounded servicemen and displaced children. She received the Legion of Honour and the Medal of Freedom for her wartime efforts.
