I really took my time picking out a movie at the video store last weekend. It was that Saturday between Christmas and the new year, and I had spent the day in solitude, which is not normally my way. I went to the mall to pick out my new sexy wall calendar for the year (you have to wait until after Christmas to buy one for yourself, otherwise someone may get one for you), idly wandered for a bit thinking about the lyrics of “Hard Candy Christmas,” and went to a coffee shop to see a friend who works there but who wasn’t there. I went to the home of a friend who had given me a very nice bath bomb for the holiday and offered up their modern, fancy bathtub for my use while they were out of town, and I sat on their balcony and stared into space. Then I wandered the aisles, trying to think of what I wanted to watch that night, with each DVD box that I picked up making me realize I would rather watch this or that with my friend once he got back to town. I spent a lot of time debating over the director wall and finally settled on a Hitchcock I had never seen. 

The Lady Vanishes is the last of the master’s works that he completed in England before he came to the states and engaged with the Hollywood system. Released in 1938, the film follows the misadventure of one Iris Henderson (Margaret Lockwood), a Londoner who has spent her last few weeks of being single skiing with her girlfriends at a town in the fictional country of Bandrika. On her final night, she meets the charming Mrs. Froy, a governess who is returning back to England now that her charges have outgrown their need for her tutelage, and she also encounters the ethnomusicologist Gilbert Redman (Michael Redgrave, father of Vanessa and Lynn, in his first film role), who is in the room above her and recording information about a local folk dance, which disturbs her rest. With the rail lines snowed in, two proper English snoots named Charters and Caldicott (Basil Radford and Naunton Wayne, two of the most English names I have ever seen) are also forced to stay at the same inn, where they fret over the dwindling menu and the increasing unlikelihood that they will make it to any of the cricket matches that are on their agenda. That night, unbeknownst to any of the travellers, a serenader below Mrs. Froy’s window is strangled. The next morning, an attempt is made on Mrs. Froy’s life by someone pushing a potted plant onto her head from an upper window, but Iris is struck instead. Mrs. Froy helps her onto the train and they find themselves in a compartment together. Ultimately, the two wind up having tea and getting to know each other a bit better before Iris takes a short rest. When she awakes, however, she finds Mrs. Froy missing and, worse, everyone in the compartment claims that there never was a Mrs. Froy. As she searches the train for the woman, she happens upon Gilbert again and reluctantly accepts his assistance. The two of them also encounter renowned surgeon Dr. Hartz (Paul Lukas), who attempts to persuade Iris that perhaps the whole thing is the result of her earlier blow to the head. Elsewhere, however, an English barrister named Todhunter orders his mistress (Linden Travers, cheekily credited as playing “Mrs.” Todhunter) not to admit that she saw Froy earlier, lest their involvement in an investigation reveal their affair. Who was Mrs. Froy? Where has she gone? Who is involved? 

As a longtime fan of the Alfred Hitchcock Presents TV series, I had long thought very little about this film, as I assumed it would follow the same plot as that program’s episode “Into Thin Air,” which was likewise about a young woman who is told that an older woman (in this case, her mother) was never present at the hotel in which the two are lodging. This turns out to have a completely different narrative, but according to some sources, the novel upon which The Lady Vanishes was based, Ethel Lina White’s The Wheel Spins, was partially inspired by the urban legend of The Vanishing Hotel Room, which was also more explicitly recapitulated in the aforementioned “Into Thin Air,” so it turns out I wasn’t pulling that connection out of, um, thin air. I would recommend that episode as a companion to this film; it’s one of the most cinematic, and makes great use of the minimal sets that the TV production would have had access to. Visually, this is one of Hitchcock’s most striking and sumptuous of his pre-Hollywood era. Although the modern eye can’t help but notice that the Bandrikan town in the film’s opening is a miniature, it’s a very high quality one that allows for some beautiful sweeping shots that move from the train yard to the inn. The rear projection work for the scenes set aboard the train are very effective at conveying a perfect closed loop of a narrative intertwined with a constant momentum, which is quite a lot of fun. 

Lockwood and Redgrave are fantastic together. When we first meet Iris, she comes off as a bit of a brat, being treated like royalty by the staff of the inn, who treat the milling crowd in the lobby as an afterthought. Gilbert, for this part, comes off as a cad from the outset as well, as it’s not unreasonable for Iris to request that his guests cease stomp-dancing on the floor directly above her bed. Their initial antipathy is the kind of electric interplay that the nostalgic crowd laments as lacking from contemporary film, and the way that it blossoms into a romance between them is what we go to the movies for, baby. Their interplay would be comic relief enough without the stuffy Caldicott and Charters, but the latter two are merely part of a truly iconic cast of supporting characters. I was particularly taken with “Mrs.” Todhunter, whose moral convictions and equivocations wield the power of life and death at points, even though she herself is unaware of the implications of both her silence and her admissions. Catherine Lacey, who comes into the film as the Nun late in the film, is also a world class addition, and I loved every moment we got to spend with her. The presentation is exciting, the cast is marvelous, and the mystery is wonderful. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond