Review of The Lady Vanishes (1938) by Daniel K — 08 Jul 2008

Before Hitchock made it big in America with movies like Psycho and The Birds he glorified the audience with his British movies, one of those was The Lady Vanishes from 1938 about a young beautiful girl Iris Henderson (Margaret Lockwood) who befriends and old lady Miss Froy (Dame May Whitty) on a train across europe, but when Miss Froy mysteriously dissapears from the train and when none of the passangers claims to never have seen her, Iris starts to question her own sanity, but as she teams up with a young musician Gilbert (Michael Redgrave) and a strange Dr. Hartz (Paul Lukas) she soon discovers that not all seems to fit together and that a more sinister conspiracy seem to be going on.

The movie is filled with little humorous twists that just seem to fill so well with the suspense as Iris and Gilbert desperately search the train for old Lady Froy trying to figure out which of the passengers to trust and not no trust. Several of those humorous scenes include two English men looking back to get to England for a cricket tournament, like the scene at the very beginning of the movie where a call is coming in from England, and even though the phonecall is not for them, they very briskly pics up the phone asking "what's going on in England?" only to their surprise to get a very obvious provokative answer, resulting them in slamming the phone down, a second later a guy comes over to the phone to pick up his long waited call from England, only to discover the line has been cut off. The two English men then briefly looks at each other then hurrying out seeing as it was them that was to blame for the phone line to be interrupted, another funny moments thrown in the middle of all that suspense is near the end where a group of soldiers is about to board the train, one of the English men briefly says to the other "We'll never be back for the cricket match, now.".

The Lady Vanishes is filled with these little funny moments, and only shows what kind of provocative humor Hitchcock had it works so well, it also show how much in control Hitchcock had over his movies, or at least his early British movies. The Lady Vanishes is also a great mystery movie that makes you keep guessing.