The Lady Vanishes (1938)
Alfred Hitchcock is obviously an institution, part of the essentials, the canon, and, as such, subject to a certain reverse underrating. Yeah, yeah, Hitch is great, we learned that in Elementary school and have moved on to other filmmakers of greater ambition and less tangibility. I’m probably prone to the “yeah, yeah, yeahs” sometimes myself; uninspired, who gives a shit Hitch can be tedious and impersonal, but Hitchcock at his top-tier, full throttle best, is still one of the great pleasures of the cinema. The Lady Vanishes, recently released by Criterion in a nice double disc, is a reminder of this basic truth. No one that I’ve encountered can deliver the same smooth blend cocktail best of a prime Hitchcock comedic-thriller-mystery.
Truthfully, with the exception of a few films such as Vertigo and Rear Window, even good Hitch films feel relatively impersonal. Compare him with his most frequent cover artist Brian De Palma; De Palma’s films, even usually the frequently God awful ones, are intense and feverish, they feel NECESSARY, they have to exist for their creator to continue walking down the street and drinking coffee and breathing and fucking.
Hitch’s films feel like a particularly macabre tea party, a bunch of geezers wondering what it would be like if a finger appeared in their cucumber sandwich. I’m not being disrespectful, Hitch knows this, Hitch relishes this and Hitch has even inserted variations of that scenario into his films (look at the famous near strangulation in Strangers on a Train). Hitchcock’s great films are (usually) Art of a different key, they are Art not (again usually not always) in their personality or their reveal, they are Art because they are restrained, brilliant, couldn’t be better examples of the form, the thriller. Hitchcock elevates the thriller to the level of Kabuki.
The Lady Vanishes is one of the greatest examples of this idea, Hitchcock shifts tones in the film like a particularly smooth stick shift (he had indeed already been directing pictures for thirteen years at this point). The film opens in a railroad station/hotel somewhere in a purposefully vague European country, I didn’t catch the name at all, but the IMDB reveals it to be the fictional Bandrika, a land much beloved by the quaint looking, courtly, Miss Froy (Dame May Whitty). Miss Froy strikes up a conversation with two very British gentlemen, Caldicot (Naunton Wayne) and Charters (Basil Radford). Caldicot and Charters are bent out of shape because the train to England has been delayed and they are at risk of missing an important cricket match. Miss Froy is sad to be leaving her beloved Bandrika.
Meanwhile, (yes, it’s that kind of movie), Iris (Margaret Atwood), a privileged young lady about to be married, gets into a scuttle with the lodger above her, Gilbert (Michael Redgrave) over the noise he’s making trying to record some obscure national folk song. She bribes the manager to have him thrown out, he retaliates by bunking in her room and refusing to leave until she bribes the manager to have him un-thrown out. Meanwhile again, Miss Froy, who has the room next to Iris, listens to music by a lone musician just outside her window. That is until the musician is strangled and hidden without her knowledge. In a typical Hitch touch, she tosses a coin as a tip, only to have it land on a deserted street corner.
The film is 95 minutes long, and it takes the better part of thirty of those minutes to get these and other characters on the train that I thought dominated the picture. The pleasure of the first third is the openness, the possibility of it. Hitchcock is known for the rigid planning of every shot, but The Lady Vanishes feels alive and human; funny in an uncalculated way. The first thirty minutes could just as easily be the beginning of an It Happened One Night style romance, and the ingenuity and pleasure of the film is that it never totally ISN’T that.
Then we get on the train to Britain, and Hitchcock begins to pile on the little bits that have made him a legend. I love the hum of the kind of picture that does this right: introducing a collection of seemingly desperate details and anecdotes that will have a very clear importance sometime before the final reel. As the film slips further into the second act, we notice that a very clear chill has entered the air, and that the fantastic is about to intrude. A magician shows his son a disappearing trick: POOF! A woman loses her glasses. An adulterous couple discuss the need to stay hidden in their compartment. The creepiest though is Froy and Iris’s tea; the last time they see one another before one of them disappears. Iris tells Froy her name, but a whistle goes off just as Froy tries to tell her her name. Froy responds by writing “FROY” in the condensation on the window. The next morning a woman is gone, but no one on the train seems to remember her being there to begin with.
I won’t spoil whether the lady existed or didn’t, disappeared or didn’t, but Hitchcock manages to continually ratchet the tension and the comedy to the point that we totally believe that a train could be re-routed and train-napped at the drop of a coin, and that a remarkably laid back shoot-out would be unavoidable should that situation arise. The explanation is satisfyingly creepy, absurd, and just vague enough (like many Hitchcock Macguffins) that we don’t really think about it too much.
In case you’re in risk of taking Hitchcock’s low throb ease with tone for granted, watch the Jodie Foster picture Flightplan. That film is a re-working of the “someone disappearing in a confined area” story that drives The Lady Vanishes, and is actually better than I thought it would be…for the first half. Flightplan plays, cannily for a while, on the “is it real” principle, working in a bit of parenting guilt to further up the creeps. The film is effective for a while, but the resolution is silly and needlessly convoluted. I didn’t realize until a day or two later that The Lady Vanishes is just as silly, but the particular grace and wit of Hitchcock’s slight of hand makes all the difference.
★★★★
February 7th, 2008 at 12:17 am
The Lady Vanishes is definitely on my top 10 all-time Hitchcock list. You reminded me what I liked best about the film, Chuck, which is the first half hour could easily be a romantic comedy. The characters are introduced deliberately and the atmosphere is established beautifully, giving the film real texture.
You mention Flightplan, but I think another recent movie which made a laughable attempt to steal from The Lady Vanishes was Red Eye. When it comes to elegance and wit, so few filmmakers seem to possess the skills Hitchcock had. I guess that’s why he’s a master.
February 7th, 2008 at 12:17 pm
Great review Chuck. This one sneaks up on you. It all seems so quaint and harmless, but Hitchcock is controlling the audience every step of the way.
It’s the kind of film people have tried to replicate ever since…the comedy with menace, the ordinary people wrapped up in extra-ordinary situations…but they rarely seem to get the balance just right. Even on his worst days, Hitchcock shifts gears like a pro.
It’s easy to take him for granted, but it’s a mistake. When you consider how productive he was and how often he hit the mark, not always a bullseye but always close enough.
February 7th, 2008 at 1:07 pm
Joe: I caught Red Eye and was with it for about half an hour when it looked to be a claustrophobic piece between two promising actors. But it turned into a shitty 24 episode, and lost me.
I don’t really get Wes Craven’s acclaim. He seems like a really nice, intelligent guy in interviews, but the films just don’t back him up. I’ve never loved a Craven movie, I’ve only liked a couple, and I’ve disliked many.
Craig: Spielberg used to have Hitchcock’s gift for thrillers, but his interests quickly took him elsewhere, still, there’s no one quite like the Master.
February 13th, 2008 at 10:55 am
I saw this one this morning and loved it. Heads up to all you early Hitch fans–I picked this up at FYE for 6 bucks. I got this one along with seven other Hitchcocks for that price (including 39 steps). Quality looked good, too.
Why is it so hard to recreate whimsical romance like this in today’s movies? Were people just wittier back then? Have all the good jokes been taken?
February 13th, 2008 at 12:59 pm
Travis you asked a good question and I think I’ll try to answer in very broad, assumptional terms.
1. The auteur thing. Writing by commitee seemed to be, as many before me have noted, a pretty good way to knock out an early romantic comedy.
2. The people who have the talent to write sparkling repartee would appear to be too deathly afraid of not being taken seriously to attempt it. So that leaves us with the no-talents, who, well, don’t have the talent to pull it off.
One example would be the Coen Brothers. Past films of theirs (Hudsucker, Intolerable Cruelty) show an ability to create literate, stylized dialogue. They, however, always have to assure us, the audience, that they are in on the joke and know what smarty pants genre deconstructionists they are. Simply recreating a genre would be below them. Ditto Tarantino, who would probably retire before he simply create a moment between two people that has nothing to do with a decades old film no one gives a shit about.
But I’m beginning to stray off topic. I say this as fans of both men (or teams) but I think this may be part of the answer to your question. I should also say that what I just wrote, in terms of the Coen Brothers, has nothing to do with their thrillers, which are as good as anyone currently working in the movies.