The Lady Vanishes
The Master of Suspense was so much more. Nearly all of Alfred Hitchcock’s movies are thrillers, but there are many ways to be thrilled, and he hits on several of them in “The Lady Vanishes” (1938), which is funny-breezy-romantic-suspenseful-disturbing. From what I’ve seen of Hitchcock’s ouevre, only “North by Northwest” surpasses it as an all-round entertainment. (I look forward to being proven wrong about this; my Hitchcock reviews come courtesy of a long retrospective at the Charles Theatre in Baltimore, which I’ve occasionally criticized in these pages but which deserves nothing but credit for showing these movies.)
“The Lady Vanishes” takes its time to get rolling; in the first two reels, it plays like a sprightly, ensemble comedy. Hitchcock introduces a colorful gallery of travelers stranded in a fictitious central European country. They overwhelm the hotel where they’re forced to stay overnight before catching the morning train. It appears that our heroes will be the droll English gentlemen Caldicott (Naunton Wayne) and Charters (Basil Radford), who merely want to get home to see a cricket match. With their impeccable timing and persistent obvliousness, Wayne and Radford proved so indelible that they went on to play versions of the same characters in ten additional movies.
But this being Hitchcock, after all, the hero turns out to be a beautiful woman, the wealthy and carefree Iris Matilda Henderson, who’s on her way to London to be married with a resignation that she carries lightly. Margaret Lockwood, who plays the part, has the impeccable facial geometry that Hitchcock favored, and she’s an engaging comedienne; it’s mildly surprising they never worked together again. Even later to the party is the male lead, musicologist Gilbert Redman (acting-royalty patriarch Michael Redgrave, a born star in his first major role), who’s introduced when Iris complains that he’s making too much noise in the hotel room above hers. Lockwood and Redgrave are great at suggesting the underlying attraction between two people who claim to hate each other.
The next morning, everyone piles on the train, including the kindly governess Miss Froy (Dame May Whitty), but not after Hitchcock has planted a few seeds of sinister behavior, including a flower pot, pushed from a window, that knocks Iris on the head. Miss Froy takes care of the concussed beauty on the train; they have tea together. But when Iris wakes from a nap, she’s gone, and nobody on the train will admit having seen her. Iris soon learns the old saw that it’s not paranoia if they’re really after you, and “The Lady Vanishes” blossoms into an action-packed espionage thriller that never loses its warm and varied humor, even when people are getting shot. It’s a knockout movie that leaves you satiated like a five-course meal, topped off with a cordial.