A great essay by David Cairns posted a couple of days ago on Criterion’s site in connection with the blu-ray edition of the film that is currently available. I’ve not seen this edition yet, but I cannot imagine that it would be less than the best from Criterion.
Thirty-Nine Steps to Happiness – From the Current – The Criterion
From the essay:
Thirty-Nine Steps to Happiness – From the Current – The Criterion
From the essay:
It might be a Scottish name, taken from a story about two men in a train. One man says, “What’s that package up there in the baggage rack?”
And the other answers, “Oh, that’s a MacGuffin.”
The first one asks, “What’s a MacGuffin?”
“Well,” the other man says, “it’s an apparatus for trapping lions in the Scottish Highlands.”
The first man says, “But there are no lions in the Scottish Highlands,” and the other one answers, “Well then, that’s no MacGuffin!” So you see that a MacGuffin is actually nothing at all.
—Alfred Hitchcock to François Truffaut
The shaggy-dog story that gave Alfred Hitchcock his pet name for “the thing the spies are after” but that is of no real importance to the audience may have been told to him by Angus MacPhail, an English screenwriter with a very Scottish name. If so, it’s all too apt, since The 39 Steps(1935), the first Hitchcock film to really crank up the MacGuffin as plot motor, is full of Englishmen who sound like Scots and Scots who sound like Englishmen. It also features two traveling salesmen in a train compartment who seem about to break into the MacGuffin sketch at any instant but never quite do . . .
Hitch’s Vertigo 