The 39 Steps

CHRISTMAS EVE

11.20am

Christmas just isn’t Christmas without a brilliant spy movie – and that doesn’t have to mean yet another Bond film. The 39 Steps is a thrill-a-minute adaptation of John Buchan’s classic novel about murder, espionage and skulduggery on the eve of the First World War. Rupert Penry-Jones (below) plays Richard Hannay, an engineer and former intelligence officer who is plunged into international intrigue when a British agent is found dead in his flat. Suspected of murder, and with British forces and German spies on his tail, Hannay faces a race against time to prove his innocence and crack the code in a notebook the dead man handed him before he was shot dead.