It's quite different from Alfred Hitchcock's 1930s version. The emphasis here is on spying and preventing the assassination of a Greek diplomat in 1914. The Balkans must hold together to give Britain time to prepare for the inevitable war. And it's complicated. Uncovering the villain and the villainous plot is not a simple matter of running into some guy with a bit of his finger missing. The plot is a tangled knot of fake identities and a confusion that results in both the police and the scurrilous assassins chasing Robert Powell (as Hannay) around Scotland and London.
I'm not sure any of the versions I've seen follow the novel very closely. It's been years since I've read the book but I do recall that somewhere along the way Hannay had to take a job as a ditch digger. No such vulgar passage here.
The novel aside, Hitchcock's version is an improvement over this one in many ways. The incident in which Robert Donat as Hannay spends the night in the home of a stingy, jealous farmer with a sympathetic wife is almost a short movie in itself, both suspenseful and dramatic. "Do ye eat the herring?" Nothing like that here.
On the other hand, this is pretty tense on its own. Hannay escapes from a stalled train by climbing under a bridge, only it's not over the Forth of Firth. Nice shots of Hannay as a distant figure on the Scottish hills, running for his life, his long black coat flapping, while two marksmen try to bring him down.
And the exciting climax would have suited Hitchcock to a T. A bomb that will destroy the Greek diplomat and the rest of Parliament with him is set to go off at 11:45. Hannay and the police must stop this from happening by defanging the explosive device then clambering out onto the face of Big Ben and wrestling with the mammoth minute hand. Someone falls to his death. Hitch would have loved it but this version is still well enough done to generate a lot of apprehension.
I'm not sure any of the versions I've seen follow the novel very closely. It's been years since I've read the book but I do recall that somewhere along the way Hannay had to take a job as a ditch digger. No such vulgar passage here.
The novel aside, Hitchcock's version is an improvement over this one in many ways. The incident in which Robert Donat as Hannay spends the night in the home of a stingy, jealous farmer with a sympathetic wife is almost a short movie in itself, both suspenseful and dramatic. "Do ye eat the herring?" Nothing like that here.
On the other hand, this is pretty tense on its own. Hannay escapes from a stalled train by climbing under a bridge, only it's not over the Forth of Firth. Nice shots of Hannay as a distant figure on the Scottish hills, running for his life, his long black coat flapping, while two marksmen try to bring him down.
And the exciting climax would have suited Hitchcock to a T. A bomb that will destroy the Greek diplomat and the rest of Parliament with him is set to go off at 11:45. Hannay and the police must stop this from happening by defanging the explosive device then clambering out onto the face of Big Ben and wrestling with the mammoth minute hand. Someone falls to his death. Hitch would have loved it but this version is still well enough done to generate a lot of apprehension.