Film Friday: The Lady Vanishes

Promotional still from the 1938 film The Lady Vanishes, published in National Board of Review Magazine. Image courtesy Wikimedia Commons

I think it’s often the case when a film moves us and becomes a favourite, that we feel the pull, the magic, in our first viewing. The event becomes as memorable as the film.

But there are exceptions.

I can’t remember when or where I first saw The Lady Vanishes, Alfred Hitchcock’s 1938 masterpiece. It must have been on TV, but I have no recollection of it.

What I do know is that sometime in the late 1990s when I read a short story by Paul Magrs called The Lion Vanishes, (1) I understood the references: I got the joke.

I know then that I went back to the movie — even buying it on video — and the love affair began.

The Lady Vanishes (tLV)was Hitchcock’s last truly British film: indeed its success was what prompted the invitation to Hollywood.

If the name “Hitchcock” brings to mind Psycho, The Birds, or even Strangers on a Train; stop there. tLV is an altogether kinder, more gentle film shot through with wonderful British humour.

Even better — and unlike many of Hitchcock’s later films — the female characters are allowed to do more than swoon, fawn and endure violence. In many ways, the story is female-driven.

Wikipedia describes the film’s plot thus:

… based on the 1936 novel The Wheel Spins by Ethel Lina White, the film is about a beautiful English tourist travelling by train in continental Europe who discovers that her elderly travelling companion seems to have disappeared from the train. After her fellow passengers deny ever having seen the elderly lady, the young woman is helped by a young musicologist, the two proceeding to search the train for clues to the old lady’s disappearance.

Released in 1938, the film’s fictional countries and political turmoils were thinly veiled references to the world war that was looming. The triumph of the British characters over the alternately evil and bumbling foreigners was inevitable, but executed with great skill and wit.

Health warning

The Lady Vanishes  had a truly execrable Hollywood remake in 1979. I can’t even bring myself to talk about it. Avoid it at all costs!

About Film Friday

Sarah at Art Expedition, and Darren, The Arty Plantsman have initiated this great new blogging project. You can find out more and see their chosen films for the week by visiting Sarah’s or Darren’s latest posts.

#filmfriday

---

1. The Lion Vanishes can be found in the short story collection Playing Out by Paul Magrs, 1997.