Review of The Lady Vanishes (1938) by Andrew J — 30 Aug 2008

The Lady Vanishes is a perfect entertainment. It is pitch perfect as a thriller with its tongue persistently in its cheek. During the climactic scene wherein the train, in which most of the story takes place, is diverted to a sidetrack and a shootout ensues, we are in suspense yet it gets away with tremendous laughs delivered by a wry and silly sense of humor.

Margaret Lockwood is a poised and attractive leading lady, playing an independent young woman returning home from a fictitious pre-WWII Central European country to get married. Sheâ??s amongst an assorted bunch of traveling characters keen to go back to England. On the train back after being delayed by an avalanche, she befriends a gleeful old lady played by the unmistakable Dame May Whitty, while the remaining passengers in the compartment appear not to understand a word of English. When Lockwood reawakens after dozing off because of an incident with a falling flowerpot, Whitty has vanished, leaving Lockwood shocked to learn that the other passengers claim the elderly lady was never aboard at all and the other English travelers deny ever seeing her.

This stands as one of Hitchcockâ??s finest works, even above some of his more celebrated films. Maintaining ideal timbre between scenes of almost unbearable suspense, particularly in a scene of exceptionally conceived simplicity, and broad humor, one of its most memorable comic moments being the reaction to a gunshot by one of two permanently nonchalant upper-class Englishmen, both of whom are perhaps my favorite characters, reflecting a proud archetype of English persona and poise. Despite the time in which this artwork of entertainment was made, it is timeless, for its datedness has since 1938 grown to be a charm.

What makes a success out of a lightweight entertainment like The Lady Vanishes is its director. Many merry comic adventures have been difficult to watch again in spite of decent writing, star power and presence, and other pleasing mainstream qualities. The reason numerous become less than high-quality is because a director like Alfred Hitchcock is not only an exceptional visionary but also very hard to come by. There are even lots of directors whose work I hold very dear who perhaps would have made a lesser film. Hitchcock was a master of truly fulfilling cinematic entertainment. He very rarely made a film with any particular intention other than to entertain. That was his skill, his art, his born talent, and he did it better than nearly any other filmmaker to date. His spy stories and murder mysteries, both of which are descriptions that apply to this masterwork, are dense enough, complex enough and not too categorizable per genre so that a film that in other hands would most likely have been a much too lighthearted spy romp is a taut, perfectly English-flavored silver screen tour de force.