John Buchan's 39 Steps (1915) began as a serialized adventure story concerning a Canadian civilian in London who gets caught up in espionage and murder during the early days of World War One. Hitchcock's film version was shot in 1935, four years before the start of World War Two, though you could say that World War Two began when the German Nazi Party took power in 1933.
The picture up top comes halfway through the film, with the Canadian on the run in Scotland looking to absolve himself of murder by solving it. He asks a farmer for food and lodgings, and after the two agree on a price, he is shown to a kitchen and left with the farmer's wife, whom the Canadian originally thought was the farmer's daughter.
The farmer's mention of a "box bed" is demoed by the farmer's wife: a sliding door that reveals a three-foot-high bed recessed into the kitchen wall. By now we have a sense that the wife feels something for the Canadian. She is from Glasgow, she tells him, and he asks her if she misses the bustle of what was by then a modern city. She does of course, which only underlines how unhappy Hitchcock needs her to appear. For why else would she help the Canadian escape when the thugs show up to kill him?
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