To venture into Alfred Hitchcock’s mysterious and mischievous “The 39 Steps” is to take a leisurely stroll through the director’s favorite storytelling devices. Everything is here, in perhaps the most densely packed of his pre-war accomplishments: the deep focus, the overlapping sound design, the blond heroine, the man-against-the-world adventure story. Even in the title we have the classic Hitchcock MacGuffin: 39 steps to what? Richard (Robert Donat) doesn’t know, and it doesn’t much matter; whatever the secret may mean, his knowledge of those 39 steps has made him a dead man walking, wanted not only by the cops, who think he’s killed a woman, but also by the gaggle of assassins who actually killed her, convinced that she told him the whole story before she died.

Now, some 70 years after the film’s debut, a brand-new print of “The 39 Steps” arrives at the Brooklyn Academy of Music for a weeklong engagement starting Friday.

From the very first scene, Hitchcock’s refined sense of misdirection is on glorious display. The story begins in a theater and Hitchcock, who was 36 when the movie was released, sets the camera in the midst of the audience. We watch a man with a superior memory field questions from the crowd. Off to the left is the theater’s bar, where a drunken spectator starts harassing the performer, and as a brawl breaks out, Hitchcock cuts to a close-up of a gun. A shot rings out, panic ensues, and Richard finds himself out on the street chatting up a woman he’s never met.

Her name is Annabella — though Robert won’t find that out until later — and she immediately asks if she can go home with this stranger to escape all this chaos. Richard thinks he’s captivated her with his charisma, but, as is almost always the case in Hitchcock’s stories, her flirting has more complicated motivations.

Not all that different in tone from Hitchcock’s later Hollywood hits “North by Northwest” and “The Man Who Knew Too Much,” “The 39 Steps” finds Richard traversing the countryside in an effort to evade both the establishment and its subverters. As the plot thickens, he’s forced to make a daring escape from a moving train, is double-crossed time and again by men on both sides of the law, and eventually finds himself back at the same theater where the story began, listening to the same man of memory, replaying the film’s opening scene.

What really makes the film click, though, is Richard’s fallible, everyman status. He’s improvising as he moves forward, and we can help navigate the terrain as he improvises a political speech, an escape, and a daring plan B. We gasp at his many dangerous decisions because, occasionally, Hitchcock allows him to fail. Like so many of the director’s antiheroes to come, Richard doesn’t project the invincibility of a Bruce Willis or a Vin Diesel. He’s as likely to finish the story as to die trying.

Also notable is the way that “The 39 Steps” works both as surface distraction and nuanced artwork. We have the chases, the gunshots, the near-escapes, and the larger mystery of an act of treason. We have the cadre of women, and the subdued erotic tension. But it doesn’t take a film scholar to see the technical prowess already flowing from the young director’s mind. In the lighting of a stairwell, the tilted close-ups, the provocative points of view that offer and deny information to the viewer, the detailed choreography of the chase sequences — even in the understated charisma shared by Donat and Madeleine Carroll, who plays his unwitting assistant — “The 39 Steps” didn’t find Hitchcock taking baby steps, but breaking into a sprint.

ssnyder@nysun.com