Hitchcock Film Series. ‘The Lady Vanishes’ – Book Review

 picture edited by Laura Lai

by Laura Lai/Review 

I posted this week my review of the movie The Lady Vanishes (1938) directed by A. Hitchcock. This movie is based on the novel The Wheel Spins (or The Lady Vanishes) written by the British crime author Ethel Lina White (1876-1944). 

Thanks to the Gutenberg Project Australia the book is available free of charge as an eBook. The book is divided into thirty-three chapters and it is a great novel for spy genre lovers, as well as for mystery books lovers. For those reading in English as a foreign language, the book is well crafted, is literary, and its vocabulary should not put too many problems for the readers. This book was of great interest to me from the point of view of the movie. More precisely, I wanted to know things like: What elements from the book did the film director keep? Which one-third of the plot he kept? And why?

            First and foremost, the film director kept the general spy and mystery genre. Second, similarly to the movie, most of the action happens on the train – a night express coming from somewhere in the Balkans, maybe even from Turkey and passing by the Balkans going to Trieste-Milan-Calais; and from there, to London (ch.5). Third, there is a Miss Froy that vanished from the compartment, as well as the complicity of those in the compartment and of the stewards to convince Iris that she was imagining, dreaming, inventing the whole Ms. Froy story. Furthermore, similar to the movie, the disappearance of Ms. Froy involved a doctor and there is an investigative couple: Iris and a young man named Hare.

            Other elements kept in the movie, but slightly adapted are the signature of Ms. Froy on the ‘smoked window’ (ch. 26), Trieste as an execution place (ch. 27), the scene Iris was sedated (ch. 32), and the general ‘shouting, smoking and gesticulation’ (ch. 33) with what the movie actually starts.

            Instead, the film director came up with different sets of characters that deepened the mystery, elaborated more on the execution scene for more action in a spy genre movie, and left aside lots of descriptions of places, and characters’ details that are more appropriate for a book writing than for a movie. Knowing how much to take and how much to leave, makes both the book well-written and the movie well-done. J

In the book, I have not found the expression ‘don’t judge a country by its politics’, but I found ‘[p]ersonally, I should not compare Italy with Piccadilly Circus’ (ch. 24), which might have been the one giving the scriptwriter the idea to come up with something even wiser. Instead, the book contains the formulation of another great observation: 

‘…strangers were caricatures of humanity – blank, insensible, and heartless. While Miss Froy was going to be murdered, no one cared for anything but dinner.’ (ch. 27) 

It is a good observation, but, sadly, a true one. In documentary movies, there are testimonies of illegal property seizing at the beginning of WWII, while nobody was protesting, even going and enjoying holidays. Then, Europe was bombed, artifacts from many museums were seized, and when people realized what was happening, it was too late to react: the whole world was at war.

The characters in this book, which is a piece of art and of literature, only care about their dinner because some of them did not even believe the story of Miss Froy who got vanished. But in real life, some real characters on the stage of life not only do not care about the misfortune of somebody else, but some are even accomplices to it – as the characters in the book. The formulation 'caricature of humanity’ is very artistic - it makes the reader visualize a caricature, and in it, it is humanity depicted. And the scene is better visualized, and Iris's emotions and perceptions are better understood. 

Real life is, usually, beautifully mirrored in art. The artist knows what to take from real life, and what not to so that art has the power to reach the soul. So is with this book and the movie. Ethel Lina White crafted a great spy book, while Alfred Hitchcock adapted it and made it a great spy movie.

Enjoy both the book and the movie! And I'll see you in the next review of Hitchcock’s movies!