Day 40/42 - The Lady Vanishes (1938)

The Lady Vanishes shows its low budget from the beginning when a camera begins a surprisingly jerky pan of a miniature "Bandrika" train station, a fictional foreign country pre-World War II. The beginning section is slow as it establishes the characters with 1930s "witty repartee." A group of English travelers are trapped in this border hotel while the train is dug out from an avalanche.

Our initial focus seems to be on two English gentlemen who are trying to get to England in time for a major cricket match. There is Iris (Margaret Lockwood), a rich bored young woman who is heading back to England to marry her boring fiancé. She meets a sweet old English governess, Miss Froy (Dame  May Whitty), who is heading home after six years. Miss Froy listens to a folk singer who is serenading below her window. The moment is disturbed by noise coming from above Iris' room.  Gilbert (Michael Redgrave), a cheeky young musicologist in the Noel Coward-vein is collecting folk songs from the region and is having three of the staff dance and sing while he records their music. When Iris gets him thrown out, he joins her in her room until she agrees to have him reinstated. The governess continues to listen to the folk singer, but he is mysteriously strangled, unbeknownst to her.

The next morning people begin boarding the train. Just as the Iris helps Miss Froy, someone knocks down a planter which hits Iris on the head. Dazed, she is taken by Miss Froy to a compartment. Also in their compartment is a traveling magician, his wife and child, a Baroness, all foreign. 

The plot begins after Iris and Miss Froy share tea. Iris sleeps, and when she awakens Miss Froy is gone and no one admits to having seen her. Eventually Iris enlists the help of Gilbert and a Dr. Hartz to find Miss Froy and a search of the train begins. Has Iris hallucinated the whole thing or is something much more sinister at hand?

[For a much more psychologically disturbing use of the disappearance theme, find The Vanishing, a 1988 Dutch film based on The Golden Egg, about a man whose wife disappears from a gas station.]

The rest of the film involves spies, coded songs, a clue written on a window, a fight in a baggage compartment, a fake nun, and Englishmen trapped on a train with foreign military men shooting at them.

Hitchcock memorably used trains in several of his films: Strangers on a Train, Shadow of a Doubt, North by Northwest, The 39 Steps.

Among some of Hitchcock’s early signatures are the ordinary individual as hero, the double, (people who are not who they seem to be), the seemly benign villain, close-ups of sinister objects, the surprises hidden in the luggage compartment, a MacGuffin never fully explained, and a resolution with a happy ending where the bad dream is banished away.

Hitchcock in interviews talked about the importance of building suspense by showing the audience something a character doesn’t know and then playing with that idea. Here we have drugged drinks that we know have been doctored but of which the characters are unaware.

Even though there are obvious cheap film techniques—the miniature sets are laughably and the rear projections clearly artificial—Hitchcock’s strength is always his storytelling so that one tends to ignore the falseness.

This was the last of Hitchcock’s London films, made to fulfill his contract with producer Edward Black. The growing threat of the English by the Germans can be felt particularly near the end of the film. While the film takes place in a fictional country, it is pretty obviously German in culture. The small group of English trying to reach London become separated from a main train and will be executed if caught--a seemly obvious symbol. One of the characters who claims he is a pacifist tries to surrender and is shot. Another obvious symbol.

While this is not one of Hitchcock’s masterpieces, it certainly shows the artist growing into the man who would create Vertigo, Psycho, and Rear Window (my favorites).

The Lady Vanishes (1938) *** The entire film can be streamed on The Internet Archive or Hula Plus.