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Back to Basics - The Lady Vanishes
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Back to Basics is my effort to remedy the numerous film classics from through out the world that for whatever reason I have always managed to skip, miss or just have escaped my radar
One of the biggest black spots in my film viewing is Alfred Hitchcock’s time as a director in Britain. I have seen a handful of the movies that set the groundwork for his legendary career but primarily it is Hitchcock’s later American work, from Notorious to Psycho that I know best.
One of Hitchock’s most acclaimed British films is 1938’s The Lady Vanishes. The melding of thrills and humor he is so renowned for spring up all over the picture. However, at the start of The Lady Vanishes, the film seems more like an out and out comedy. We arrive at a overcrowded hotel in Badrika, where a variety of Europeans bustle about, trying to get a room. Several groups of English men and women haggle for space, including two cricket enthusiasts Caldicott and Charters, played to dead pan precision by Naunton Wayne and Basil Radford. The duo get a room, the maid’s, whose constant arrival and frequent undressing distresses Caldicott and leads to Chaters bumping his head into the low hotel ceilings.
Accustomed to numerous Hitchcock films, what I found so fascinating about The Lady Vanishes is the blatancy of the laughs. The dark humor is had later in the picture, the cruel laughs so common in most of the director’s oeuvre. The way its held off lets Hitchcock and screenwriters Sidney Gilliat and Frank Launder casually let the characters form friendships and annoyances that fold and contort as they move from hotel to train. Aside from Caldicott and Charters, we have Iris (Margaret Lockwood), a fairly wealthy woman set to soon be unhappily married, the elderly and mannered Miss Froy (Dame May Whitty) and the confident bordering on arrogant Gilbert (Michael Redgrave). As Iris waits to hop on the train, she receives a severe blow to the head. Upon the journey, she befriends Miss Froy, who soon after vanishes. Iris seeks her out but is told by her fellow passengers Miss Froy does not exist and ever so quietly, the drama steps forth.
The subtlety of the tension is tremendous. Iris pleads for assistance but is accused of paranoia and delusions. The train engines chug along continuously in the background as Hitchcock pricks the plot forward. Everyone could be a suspect, everyone against her. The mystery unfolds elegantly, clues opening more oddities, companions growing closer to help or hurt Iris’s cause. Her most valued accomplice is Gilbert. Lockwood and Redgrave share a endearing chemistry, and their previous squabbles unravel a possible romance. In the last quiet moment before the film flips into pure thriller, Gilbert fondly tells Iris, “Do you know why you fascinate me?...You haven’t any manners at all and you’re always seeing things.”
The line is but one of many clever slices of the screenplay. The best are almost all had by Caldicott and Charters. While sitting down to dinner, the waiter steadily tries to tell them the hotel is out of food but the two are unable to interpret. Befuddled, Charters turns to Caldicott and proclaims, “These people have a passion for repeating themselves.”
It all adds up to making The Lady Vanishes a marvelous picture, easily worthy of its years of praise. In the Criterion DVD booklet, it states that, “Francois Truffaut declared that every time he tried to study the film’s trick shots and camera movements, he became too absorbed in the plot to notice them.” That said, there is one scene, where Gilbert escapes a locked room of the speeding train through a window which stands out as magnificent. Gilbert slowly crawls along the side of the passage cars when blaring from out of nowhere a train comes hurtling towards him only a few feet away. Gilbert grass on for dear life. In my eyes, it stands among the definite images of Hitchcock’s career.
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