The Lady Vanishes Saved by Oddball Characters

 

THE LADY VANISHES (1938)

Directed by Alfred Hitchcock

Gaumont-British Picture Corporation, 97 minutes, Not-rated

In English, French, Italian, and German (with subtitles)

★★★

 

 

The Lady Vanishes is a mixture of film noir, drama, and eccentric British humor, though as Alfred Hitchcock films go, it doesn’t stand up as one of his stellar efforts. It opens in a made-up location analogous to a Swiss or French Alpine ski resort town. Iris Henderson (Margaret Lockwood) hopes to return to England to get married, but an avalanche forces everyone on the coast-bound train to depart and spend the night at a hotel. The usual confusion and jockeying ensues over who gets rooms and of what level of comfort. Iris has a small set-to with an ethnomusicologist Gilbert Redman (Michael Redgrave).

 

Note the date: 1938. This is a time in which much Europe is already at war or about to be. You’d not know there was anything wrong by listening to Charters (Basil Radford) and Caldicott (Naunton Wayne), two older British bachelors whose main concern is that they might not get back to England in time to catch the end of a big cricket test match. By the next day the snow is cleared from the rails, but as people prepare to board, a flower planter plonks Iris on the head. She is helped onto the train by Miss Froy (Dame May Whitty), an older woman. Later she has tea with Froy then retires to her compartment to sleep. When she awakes, Froy is nowhere to be found. She queries everyone she met the night before, including lawyer Eric Todhunter (Cecil Parker) and his mistress who is passing herself off as his wife. No one recalls having seen Froy on the train. Everyone, except for Charters and Caldicott, think the blow to the head has made Iris imagine things.

 

There’s your mystery: Where is Miss Froy? Things get a bit more odd when the Germanic Doctor Hartz (Paul Lukas, who was actually Hungarian) boards with a heavily bandaged patient being tended by a deaf-mute nun who looks like Froy and whom Todhunter’s mistress insists is she. There’s a knife-wielding Italian magician and enough intrigue to keep viewers guessing. Are we seeing some sort of Nazi plot? A game of spy-versus-spy? An international incident in the making? Lots of people who aren’t who they are pretending to be? A switcheroo? Is Iris really potty, or was the flowerpot that crowned her not an accident? Why iwas a non-skiing ethnomusicologist doing at the resort? The only constant is that Charters and Caldicott are really worried about missing the cricket match. (Speaking of batty!)

 

Radford and Wayne must have had a blast playing Charters and Caldicott. They are like Shakespeare’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern crossed with Detective Clouseau and a pair of upper-class twits from a Monty Python sketch. In many ways, they are the best thing in the film, the latter an occasionally awkward mélange of mystery, beat-the-clock drama, tension, and peculiar characters. I suspect it was no accident that some of the film’s devices are reminiscent of Agatha Christie’s Murder on the Orient Express, which was published four years earlier. To be sure there are classic Hitchcock devices–suspense, point of view shots, skewed camera angles, subtle class commentary–but it’s not very hard to figure out where things are headed.

 

The Lady Vanishes is often classified as a thriller and is often said to be one of Hitchcock’s best films, but it’s no North by Northwest or Psycho. Take the diverting oddity of Charters and Caldicott from the film and you’d be left with a drama quite a lot like others from the World War II era. That means you’d still have a decent way to spend an hour and a half, but you’d probably not wear out a thesaurus searching for superlatives. Luckily, Charters and Caldicott are there. As I often say, the English are unrivaled when it comes to oddballs. Charters and Caldicott make unraveling the mystery fun and the grit and pluck of the movie’s revelations more stiff upper lip believable.

 

Rob Weir