Saturday Night Cinema: The Lady Vanishes

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Tonight's Saturday Night Cinema feature is The Lady Vanishes. "Vintage Hitchcock, with the pacing and superb editing that marked not only his 30s style but eventually every film that had any aspirations whatever to achieving suspense and rhythm." I think it's the best of Hitchock's early, British productions.

"My favourite Hitchcock: The Lady Vanishes" The Guardian

On
top of a mesmerising plot, perfect casting and the greatest comic duo
in British cinema, this comedy thriller derives special urgency from the
troubled times in which it was made

The Lady Vanishes (1938)

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Delightfully British
… Dame May Whitty, Margaret Lockwood and Michael Redgrave in The Lady
Vanishes (1938). Photograph: Moviestore Collection/Rex

Hitchcock and railways go together like a locomotive and tender.
He loved them, they figure significantly in his work and never more so
than in The Lady Vanishes.
Much of what happens could only take place on a railway line –
passengers delayed together by an avalanche; classes compartmentalised;
strangers trapped together as they're transported across a continent; an
engine driver killed in crossfire; a carriage disconnected and shunted
on to a branch line; an intrepid hero struggling from one carriage to
another outside a fast-moving train as other locomotives rush by; clues
in the form of a name traced in the steam on a window, and the label on a
tea packet briefly adhering to another window; and above all the
enforced intimacy on this rhythmically seductive transport moving on its
own tracks, independent of the changing landscape around it.

  1. The Lady Vanishes
  2. Production year: 1938
  3. Country: UK
  4. Cert (UK): PG
  5. Runtime: 97 mins
  6. Directors: Alfred Hitchcock
  7. Cast: Margaret Lockwood, Michael Redgrave
  8. More on this film

The Lady Vanishes is one of the greatest train movies from the genre's golden era, challenged only in the master's oeuvre by North By Northwest for the title of best comedy thriller
ever made. Except for the opening sequence at an inn in a central
European village, it takes place on an express train that has only two
official stops in the course of its journey across the authoritarian
central European country of Banrika. During this suspenseful voyage, a
middle-aged British spy posing as Miss Froy, an eccentric governess, and
carrying the film's MacGuffin,
is abducted by foreign agents, and her disappearance is covered up.
Shot on a modest budget, largely at the small Gainsborough studio in
Islington, it never seems cramped or corner-cutting (though it's
calculatedly confined), and it zips along with the speed of the
Eurostar. In his 1966 interview book, Le Cinéma Selon Hitchcock,
Truffaut told the master that every time he saw the film he intended to
study the train's movements, the editing and the special effects, "but
each time I become so absorbed with the story that I've yet to figure
out the mechanics of that film".

Adapted from Ethel Lina White's
novel The Wheel Spins, it was initially to be directed by Roy William
Neill, an American B-movie specialist now best known for the Sherlock
Holmes series starring Basil Rathbone and Nigel Bruce. But the film's
second unit ran into trouble with the Jugoslav police while shooting
background material, the picture was put on hold, and Neill returned to
Hollywood. When the project was revived and Hitchcock took over, the
script, a great improvement on the book, was pretty well ready to shoot.
The screenwriters, Frank Launder and Sidney Gilliat, both much
influenced by Hitchcock, had radically reworked the plot and the
characters and most significantly had invented the insouciant
cricket-loving Englishmen, Charters and Caldicott. As played by Basil
Radford and Naunton Wayne, they were to become the greatest comic duo
ever created in the British cinema, national archetypes that stamped
themselves on several generations of moviegoers. The role played by
Wilfred Hyde-White in The Third Man was originally written by Graham
Greene for Radford and Wayne, and they were much admired by Harold
Pinter. Launder and Gilliat invented a national language for Banrika and
a decade later were to do the same for their own espionage picture,
State Secret.

The casting, in which Hitchcock was closely
involved, was perfection, most crucially that of Margaret Lockwood and
Michael Redgrave as Iris and Gilbert, the attractive romantic couple at
the centre, who meet cute, bicker beautifully and share a delightfully
British sense of humour. Both became stars in this picture and proved
themselves the equals of such sophisticated 30s Hollywood couples as
Powell and Loy, Grant and Hepburn, Lombard and Gable. But although The
Lady Vanishes comes up fresh whenever one sees it, it's a film that
derives its depth and urgency from the troubled times in which it was
made. It was shot during the spring and summer of 1938 in the months
leading up to Neville Chamberlain's capitulation at Munich, and Iris and
Gilbert are passengers on a ship of fools, a compartment of British
clowns adrift in a hostile Europe, surrounded by inimical foreigners in a
world on the brink of war.

Gilbert is a politically naive
musicologist collecting folk songs in the Balkans. Iris is a spoiled
heiress returning to England to marry a chinless aristocrat for his
title. In the adjoining compartments are a pompous barrister (Cecil
Parker) and his mistress (Linden Travers), both cheating on their
spouses and more concerned about their social status and professional
future than their moral and civic responsibilities. Likewise, the
blinkered Charters and Caldicott won't let more serious obligations
stand in the way of getting back to England to see the test match at Old
Trafford. Only Miss Froy (Dame May Whitty), the courageous little old
lady, is there to carry the torch for Britain and bear the vital
MacGuffin (in the form of a state secret encoded in a piece of folk
music) that may save the nation. Except for the barrister, who dies
waving a white flag in the belief that the totalitarian enemy will
respect Geneva conventions, they all turn up trumps at the end, just as
Britain was to do at the last minute when war came in 1939. The
expatriate Brits, however, are ultimately saved through the
self-sacrifice of the only working-class English person aboard
(Catherine Lacey). She's a woman disguised as a nun (the working-class
Hitchcock's Catholicism comes out here) who has been inveigled into
working for the evil schemer of Bandrika. As a prophetic commentary on
its troubled times, on a world living under the storm clouds that are
about to unleash the lightning of the second world war, The Lady
Vanishes stands alongside two films of the following year that offer
allegorical images of countries on the point of confronting cataclysmic
events: John Ford's Stagecoach and Jean Renoir's La Règle du Jeu.

The
Lady Vanishes was Hitchcock's penultimate film in pre-war Britain, his
greatest critical and box-office success up to that time. Frank S
Nugent, the New York Times critic, and later to become Ford's regular
collaborator, immediately chose it as one the year's best 10 pictures,
writing: "If it were not so brilliant a melodrama, we should class it as
a brilliant comedy. Seeing it imposes a double, a blessedly double
strain: when your sides are not aching from laughter your brains are
throbbing in an attempt to outguess the director." In the New York
Herald-Tribune, Howard Barnes went even further: "The Lady Vanishes is a
product of individual imagination and artistry quite as much as a
Cézanne canvas or a Stravinsky score." When it opened in London's West
End in the autumn of 1938, it was the first time Hitchcock had seen his
name above the lights in a film's title, and he had his lap of honour,
driving around Leicester Square, relishing the spectacle.

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Shy Guy
Shy Guy
10 years ago

Michael Redgave – Vanessa’s father. Phooey!

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Thanks for sharing!