The Lady Vanishes (1938)

The Lady Vanishes is the next to last movie that Hitchcock made before leaving England for the USA.  By this point in his career he had larger budgets to work with, and had garnered quite a bit of international recognition.  He had hit a huge home run with The 39 Steps back in 1935, and had a few well-received but less fantastic films that followed it up.  But in 1938 he released another real masterpiece, a film that still stands out as one of his best: The Lady Vanishes.

This is a film that perfects the pacing of a thriller.  Actually, The Lady Vanishes begins in almost every respect as a comedy.  It is light and funny, introducing and showcasing its characters in engaging and lovable ways.  There is a young English girl, Iris (played by Margaret Lockwood), traveling through Europe with her friends for the last time before going home to marry.  There is a pair of English gentlemen who seem to think the world begins and ends with cricket (that's a sport, for all my American friends).  There's a bumbling, lovable hotel owner, a nice English lady on her way home after serving as a foreign governess, and a young rascally man writing a book on folk dance who insists on doing loud, stomping research late at night in the town hotel.

As I said, things start off innocently enough, with clever and witty dialogue and not a few running gags (such as the maid having to come in and out of the room with the cricket nerds).  There's been a snow avalanche covering the rail lines, and the hotel of a small alpine town in some unnamed European country is packed with travelers trying to get home.  Everything is going along swimmingly; meals are eaten, the travelers are serenaded by a man outside playing the guitar, and the worst problem (aside from the hotel running out of food) is the loud music and dancing from the top floor room of the folk dance researcher.

But then somebody kills the singer outside.  And the next day somebody pushes a pot from a high window, which then injures Iris, our main protagonist.  Things have become a bit sinister, and Hitchcock just slowly dials up the pressure from there.  After all, once the train gets going the next day, the lady vanishes.  Where did Miss Froy go, the lovable English governess who befriends Iris?  She just disappears, and for no apparent reason nobody on the train other than Iris seems to remember that she had been on at all.  From here we get some fantastic movie-making; at one point Hitchcock even has us the audience doubting that Miss Froy really was there at all.

I won't give away the end, because you ought to see this film.  But the plot seamlessly and deftly moves from very light to mystery to action, maintaining the suspense throughout.  For all of this, the praise deservedly goes to Hitchcock.

But upon Hitchcock's shoulders falls the blame for the movie's shortcomings.  Fortunately, those shortcomings are very few.  The movie's worst moment is the opening shot: we are presented with that Alpine village in a shot that sweeps into town from outside of town, all the way to the front door of the hotel. Of course, the village in the shot is a model, and obviously so.  It is a good model, but a bad effect and does not age well.  Another issue has to do with the central MacGuffin, the reason everybody is after poor Miss Froy.  For spoiler reasons I can't tell you what it is, but I can say as far as coded messages go it strains credulity by quite a bit.

But those are small complaints, issues that only really serve to show the great parts of The Lady Vanishes in greater relief.  This is everything that a movie ought to be; funny, memorable, entertaining, a bit mysterious, and nail biting to the end.  This is a lady worth finding.

Entertainment: 8/10
Artistic value: 5/10
Technical merit: 6/10

Overall: 7.5/10