This is not a good movie. It is very slow. It is also very boring. The story line is awful. It just a waste of time. Do not see this awful movie. See Psycho do not see this.

This early Hitchcock feature resembles his earlier hit "The 39 Steps" it could have been called "The 40 Steps". Again we have an innocent young man charged with murder who goes on the run in tow with a pretty young female who at first dislikes and disbelieves him but who before too long has fallen for him and helped clear his name.The best thing in front of the camera is the 18 year old, strikingly named Nova Pilbeam, (wonderful name for a debutante!) who is pretty, sunny and charming in equal measure. The equally wonderfully named Derrick De Marney, who plays the man on the run, Robert Tusdall, on the other hand, I found to be a bit more gormless with an odd smirk on his face which never quite goes away. Together they mesh reasonably well if you can excuse their frightfully posh clipped English accents of the time. There are some nice Hitchcockian touches that as a fan I enjoyed, like the way he starts the film right in the middle of a bitter argument between the soon-to-be-murdered film actress and her jealous, twitchy, in more ways than one, husband, the way Tisdall distracts the courtroom staff to make his escape, a ruse similarly played out in more than one subsequent Hitch feature, most notably "North By Northwest's" auction scene, the saved-by-her-fingertips rescue of Pilbeam after the car crashes down an old mine shaft, featuring a subjective face-shot we'd see again in "Saboteur" and of course "North By North-west" plus most famously the great tracking shot near the end which literally eyeballs the guilty man.Lots of the rest of it, to be honest is a little stiff and creaky, like the scenes with Pilbeam and her family round the breakfast table and of dull, plodding policemen on their tails. There are some awful model shots too, one in particular of Tisdall running away from the camera had me giggling out loud and the fact that the show-band is playing in black-face certainly jars with modern sensibilities.But otherwise, you can see Hitchcock forming his style here, although it would take an Atlantic crossing a few years later for the Master to deliver a mostly superb run of films throughout the 40's and 50's on which his reputation largely rests.

Sandwiched between "The 39 Steps" and "The Lady Vanishes", "Young and Innocent" is an oft neglected thriller by Alfred Hitchcock. Released in 1937, the film stars Derrick De Marney as Robert Tisdall, a struggling screenwriter who is wrongly accused of a crime. On the run from the police, Tisdall sets off to both prove his innocence and locate the film's true culprit.It's a familiar Hitchcockian plot, but "Young and Innocent" nevertheless contains a number of excellent moments. These include an elaborate, now famous crane shot, and an audacious cutaway to a flock of birds, angrily screaming as a corpse tumbles into view.Bizarrely, Hitchcock paints Tisdall as a man who, though innocent of murder, nevertheless feigns innocence in order to win the heart of a naive teenager (directors Eric Rohmer and Claude Chabrol would flat-out label Tisdall a "weasel" and "male gigolo"!). In this way the film's title has a double meaning: Tisdall, innocent of crime, but unscrupulous enough to prey upon the genuinely young and innocent. 7.5/10 – Worth one viewing.

If you analyze the Hitchcock films of the pre-"Rebecca" days, you will notice more artistic qualities in them that not entirely disappeared as he became more commercialized in his Hollywood work. While "The Man Who Knew Too Much", "The 39 Steps" and "The Lady Vanishes" are all considered masterpieces, others, like "Sabatoge" and "Young and Innocent", have been neglected, but in further study, are quite influential in many of the technical aspects and different ways of moving the plot forward.For "Young and Innocent", Hitchcock uses a plot line he later altered for 1956's "The Wrong Man" in which a man (Derrick De Marney here) insists he is not guilty of the crime he is accused of, in this case murder. Nova Philbeam is the innocent young woman, the daughter of the local police chief, who reluctantly gets involved in aiding him, and eventually comes to believe in his innocence. There are so many great moments here, especially De Marney's clever escape from the courtroom, the scene in a mine where a car collapses into a sink hole, and the final scene with a big band involved in wrapping up the plot line. Then, there is the shot of Hitchcock, the ham silent actor here, outside the courtroom, that is quite amusing for fans always anxious to find him in his own movies, like an early "Where's Waldo?" puzzle.This is a film of particular interest, not only because of the breathtaking photography, but because of the sly writing which keeps you glued, and the fact that the two stars are not extremely well known actors. This makes their adventures and exploits all the more suspenseful. I've always thought that the British filmmakers had a headway on new methods of the technical art in films, and were sometimes more daring than the American major studios of the time. It is seeing films like this that continue to convince me that this is true, and you can see those influences in American films later on as a "new wave" style took over the screen.