The Lady Vanishes
Hitchcock's last British film and one of his most enjoyable.
The Lady Vanishes (1938). Grade: B
It is a truth universally acknowledged, that when an attractive single lady meets an attractive single gent, and they immediately dislike each other… they will continue to do so, and avoid each others’ presence, the end.
But… SPOILER ALERT… sometimes in plays or novels or movies, there can be a surprise twist to this! I won’t give it away.
Margaret Lockwood (already a big star in Britain, at age 22!) is the lady. Michael Redgrave (The Importance of Being Earnest) is the gent. She’s on a vacation with her gal pals before she settles down and marries some frump; he’s a “musicologist” who holds a ruckus party in his hotel room full of folk music and dancing at some wee hour of the morning. (I don’t think Alan Lomax did it that way.)
They wind up on the same train together (of course), and she enlists his help when an older lady (May Whitty; Dame May Whitty to you) disappears for no reason. Lockwood is really puzzled by this — why is everyone denying Whitty even existed? They talked to her, asked her to pass the sugarbowl. Is Lockwood losing her mind? (She did take a nasty bump to the head.) Is everyone conspiring to hide the truth? And it’s a moving train — where the heck did Whitty go?
You may recognize this plot device (you’re not crazy, the bad thing DID happen) from 1944’s Gaslight (itself a remake of a 1940 film); Michael Wilmington’s Criterion essay says this version may originate from a true story at a 19th century Paris Exposition. Where a woman’s brother disappeared from a hotel and everyone said he never existed — because he died of the plague, and the hotel wanted to cover that up.
Actually, that Paris Exposition story might be entirely false. Snopes thinks so. It may just be something of an urban legend. (So, naturally, Fox turned it into an episode of their television show Beyond Belief.)
What’s clever about the script here (by Sidney Gilliat and Frank Launder) is that there’s multiple reasons for people to be lying to Lockwood. One couple, who’re posing as married, are trying to avoid attention; they are married, just not to each other. Two upper-class goofballs just don’t want the train to be stopped for a police investigation, because they’re REALLY into cricket, and don’t want to miss a key match. And then there’s the sneaky ones who’re actually behind it all…
It’s one case where the production history of the film is pretty well-known, so the clever stuff in it can’t all be attributed to Genius Hitchcock. The movie had another director attached, and had started second-unit shooting in Yugoslavia, when the Yugoslavian authorities found out it portrayed their political situation in a bad light, and shut the thing down. (Given the ethnic tensions that roiled the region for hundreds of years, I don’t know how you could portray the political situation in a good light.) Hitchcock agreed to do it so he could fulfill his contract and move to Hollywood. The script became set in “Bandrika,” a vaguely alpine country that suggests every Ricola ad.
Redgrave’s very enjoyable once he starts helping Lockwood out, and she’s no swooning, fainting damsel in distress. The adulterous couple are suitably bickery. And the cricket-lovers are a hoot. Those actors (Basil Radford and Naunton Wayne) would play variations on the same theme for decades, as “Charters and Caldicott.” They’d be in movies, radio, TV, ads — they’re both a parody and a celebration of English upper-class “sportsmen” types. At the end, here, it turns out they’re also crack shots with pistols, fighting off baddies who want to murder everyone aboard. Which is nice of them, since if they hadn’t lied in the first place to get to their cricket match, everybody on the train wouldn’t be at risk of getting murdered, anyways.
It’s pretty funny when “Caldicott” complains about the newspaper’s sports section: “Nothing but baseball. You know, we used to call it Rounders. Children play it with a rubber ball and a stick. Not a word about cricket. Americans got no sense of proportion.” Baseball fans may take umbrage, but saying the game was stolen from rounders is probably right.
The plot’s a mess. That doesn’t matter TOO much, as you’ll just ignore it anyways, but I did want to know why the baddies strangled that guy at the beginning. (Alas, he meets the same fate as the chauffeur in The Big Sleep — writer indifference.) There’s some ingenious detailed model work, mostly for the fun of just doing it, and some rear projection that isn’t terrible, and one shot features a very nice painting that’s supposed to be mountains in the distance, and looks like a very nice painting.
François Truffaut, who we can probably blame as much as anyone for creating the cult of Hitchcock Genius, said of Vanishes: “Since I know it by heart, I tell myself each time that I’m going to ignore the plot (and study the technique and effect). But each time, I become so absorbed by the characters and the story that I’ve yet to figure out the mechanics of the film.” It’s models and rear projection and set paintings, François, it’s not that hard to decipher.
This is a fun film. It’s a fun film with a mess of a plot, and characters all vaguely rich enough to hang out in the Alps whenever they please, and Margaret Lockwood and Michael Redgrave. Per Turner Classic Movies, Hitchcock tried teasing Redgrave a little about his acting skill vs. that of Robert Donat (from The 39 Steps); Redgrave couldn’t have cared less. This feel like a carefree movie; and I mean that in a good way.