The Lady Vanishes (1938): Strangeness On A Train

Sure, you’ve seen some of the Alfred Hitchcock classics, like Rear Window, Vertigo, Psycho, perhaps The Birds or North By Northwest; these were some of his Hollywood pictures from the fifties and sixties. But have you seen the great classics from the 1940’s like Hitch’s first American produced movie,  Rebecca (1940)  or perhaps Shadow Of A Doubt (1943) or Notorious (1946)? And what about his even earlier British pictures from the thirties such as the first The Man Who Knew Too Much (1934), The 39 Steps (1935) or the lovely film under consideration today? While it’s true that some of those English movies suffered from bad print quality and/or poor sound reproduction (at least in the past), this is not the case with The Lady Vanishes.

By 1938, Hitchcock had found his style and had become a master of mood, suspense and mystery. He could create in his audience an anxious feeling of foreboding even where there was little or no mystery to exploit (see, for example, Judith Anderson’s creepy Ms. Danvers in Rebecca). And Hitchcock’s characteristic smirky but cute humor was well established, as well.

The Lady Vanishes has these qualities and more. It is an entertaining and engaging mystery built around what Hitchcock and others refer to as a “McGuffin”, i.e. a secret or a thing about or around which the plot revolves, something seemingly of great importance but not really. Think of the Maltese falcon, for example. InThe Lady Vanishes, it is a secret encoded in a singular melody, which must not fall into the hands of the enemy.

The keeper of this secret is the dowdy - and daughty - Miss Froy (Dame May Whitty), a tweedy, matronly, yet kindly British lady, whom our vivacious young protagonist, Iris (Margaret Lockwood), first meets at an overcrowded, Alpine hotel, in the fictional European country called  Mantrika (perhaps Austria?). Iris has been on a final vacation/fling with her girlfriends, and is about to head home to get married. But she, Miss Froy and others, including an annoyingly charming young musicologist called Gilbert (Michael Redgrave), are trapped overnight at the hotel due to an avalanche which has blocked the railway tracks. We are aware (but Iris is not) that danger may be afoot, but we don’t know why.

The next day, as Iris is about to board the train she gets head-bonked by a falling flowerpot (meant for Miss Froy?), recovers, then happily finds herself sharing a compartment with Froy - and some very odd strangers. Feeling momentarily ill, Iris leaves the compartment briefly and returns to find another lady in Froy’s place – identically dressed, but NOT Miss Froy. What’s more, the other passengers claim that this new person has always been there, and they disavow any recollection of Froy at all. The lady has vanished!  The other passengers, and soon therafter  the conductor as well, suggest that Iris must be mistaken. Perhaps that bump on the head deranged her memory?

No one on the train believes Iris. It’s as if Froy never existed.  Only Gilbert says he believes her, but whether he is sincere or just going along to flirt with Iris is not all that clear. I won’t spoil the mystery, but the balance of the train ride is interesting, amusing, fun to watch and very Hitchcockian!

The photography, especially on the train, is clever and creative. The villains are not too scary (by twenty-first century standards). Lockwood, Redgrave and Whitty handle their respective roles credibly. There are a couple of other uber-British characters on the train, a duo referred to as Charters (Basil Radford) and Caldicott (Nauntan Wayne), whose primary function in the story is   comic relief. [Interestingly, these two characters (same actors, same names and personalities) reprise their roles on another train journey in the somewhat darker Carol Reed picture, Night Train To Munich, a couple years later. And Lockwood is once again the protagonist in that film, albeit with a different name, different circumstances, etc.!]

Anyway, The Lady Vanishes is a light but captivating mystery built for viewer enjoyment. And if you’re a Hitchcock fan, it’s a must see.

96 minutes

Free at Internet Archive. Also available for streaming at Amazon Video, iTunes, and Hulu; and on DVD from Netflix.