Old Film Review. Hitchcock Series: ‘The Lady Vanishes’ (1938)

photo edited by Laura Lai

by Laura Lai/ Review 

Film’s Title: The Lady Vanishes 

Lead Actors: Margaret Lockwood (Iris Hendersen), Michael Redgrave (Gilbert), Dame May Whitty (Miss Froy), Paul Lukas (Dr. Hartz)

Director: Alfred Hitchcock 

The movie is based on the novel The Wheel Spins (1936) by Ethel Lina White (you can read the free ebook here).

The Lady Vanishes is a black-and-white thriller and one of the very last movies made by Alfred Hitchcock before moving to Hollywood. 

The action of the movie takes place mainly on the train to London, but the action starts in the hotel next to the station – that was a great opportunity for the characters to get acquainted and for the viewers to get to know the characters. The hotel was crowded and the manager was a polyglot, speaking English, Italian, French, and German – which reminded me of Switzerland when I did not know any German. J Anyway, it would have not made any difference, because the Austrians and Germans themselves do not understand spoken Swiss German – so different they are!

At this hotel, a guitar singer got killed. Then, on the railway platform, a flower pot accidentally hit Ms. Hendersen (Margaret Lockwood), a young woman going to London to get married. A chatty old British lady, Ms. Froy (Dame May Whitty), accompanied her to the train and shared the same compartment, but after Ms. Hendersen woke up from her nap, she realized that Ms. Froy disappeared – actually, vanished.

A conspiracy involving the people in the compartment, two stewards, and a dr. Hartz (Paul Lukas) was trying to convince Ms. Hendersen that she was imagining things, that there was no Ms. Froy, and even developing a plausible theory that this might have been caused by the flower pot that fell on her head in the railway station. The only person who believed her was Gilbert (Michael Redgrave) whom she previously met at the hotel. Together they started looking for Ms. Froy on the whole train.

From a technical point of view, I loved the camera shots, particularly the beginning one, when the camera gets from the outside (a mountain landscape), gets down to a hotel, then to the window of the hotel, and then inside it. This suggests the idea of a story that is going to be told. In this story, my favorite scene is the one in the luggage room, which shows a fight between some characters, with rabbits, pigeons, illusionist chamber that made the scene hilarious. 

From an artistic viewpoint, I loved the idea of an illusionist in the train that creates a diversion. But the fact that Ms. Froy vanished had nothing to do with the illusionist. Second, I loved the idea that the train turned when the story itself was turning - a brilliant idea by Hitchcock! Third, I loved the fact that Ms. Froy wrote her name on the dusted window of the train - an original idea by Hitchcock! Fourth, I loved the wise statement ‘you shouldn’t judge a country by its politics.’ The statement belonged to Ms. Froy and it is also relevant in the current political context when U.S. President Joe Biden meets the Russian President, Vladimir Putin, in Geneva (Switzerland). This quote is just perfect to remind us that a country like Russia, for example, is more than Putin. For example, Russia is about the many great writers, who entered world literature, whose works are world patrimony; it is about beautiful architecture (in St. Petersburg, for example), and a beautiful language – as there is no such thing as an ugly foreign language. It is about A. Pushkin, N. Gogol, L. Tolstoy, F. Dostoyevsky, A. Chekov, M. Gorki, and many other names and classical writing talents who painted in words époques in a great artistic way that is hard, if not impossible, to equal, because they wrote literature. Fifth, I loved the beautiful happy end. 

            I left as last and least an element that stroke me in this 1938 movie. In the train compartment, Ms. Hendersen wanted ‘to ring for an attendant’ for Ms. Froy. Nothing special, right? Well, think again! ‘Ring for an attendant’ from a button applied to the compartment door in a train in 1938? I have not seen it on the trains in 2021! J

Enjoy the movie! 

P.S.: See you in the next film review! Or in the review of the book that inspired this movie.