In this golden age of home viewing, the Criterion Collection still provides some of the best editions of the best movies ever released, usually with a rich selection of extras and often including audio commentaries (a feature they pioneered, and perhaps the greatest gift ever to film students and cinephiles alike). This column features one Criterion release per week, based entirely on where my interests lead me.
Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960) is justly famous for its opening shot, which takes you from high above the city of Phoenix right through the window of the sleazy hotel where two of the film’s characters have just enjoyed a daytime tryst. You can see the roots of that shot in the opening of Hitchcock’s The Lady Vanishes (1938), which pans across a miniature railyard and a snow-covered small town before flying through the wall of a crowded sitting room in a railroad inn—the latter accomplished by a fade that is less technically impressive but gets the job done all the same.
In my younger days, I thought I was being smart to point out the obvious fakeness of the models and rear projections used in many early films, but now that I’m older and wiser I can enjoy the cleverness of the illusion and the invitation it offers to enter an imaginary world. After all, The Lady Vanishes is set in the imaginary Eastern European country of Bandrika, and if the country is made up why should we demand the depiction of it to be photorealistic?
The people in the sitting room include Iris Henderson (Margaret Lockwood), who’s enjoying a last fling with two girlfriends (Googie Withers and Sally Stewart) before returning home to get married; the elderly music teacher Miss Froy (Dame May Whitty); the bachelor couple Charters and Caldicott (Basil Radford and Naunton Wayne); and one Mr. Todhunter (Cecil Parker) plus a glamorous woman who might be his wife (Linden Travers). Also staying at the hotel: the enthusiastic musicologist Gilbert Redman (Michael Redgrave in his only appearance in a Hitchcock film), whose early clashes with Iris tell you they are attracted to each other.
Miss Froy is a grandmotherly old lady who appears to be a bit dotty but certainly doesn’t mean to be offensive when she describes the Bandrikan people as being like “happy children…with laughter on their lips and music in their hearts.” Don’t be fooled by her cover, however: she’s in possession of the MacGuffin that drives the plot and is also the lady that vanishes. She’s not exactly a feisty old lady in the mold of, say, Margaret Rutherford, or the many Hitchcock characters of that yet to come (Jessie Royce Landis’ roles in To Catch a Thief and North by Northwest come immediately to mind), but more of a Miss Marple type as played by Joan Hickson, whose unassuming appearance and unflagging politeness camouflage her hidden depths.
The first third of The Lady Vanishes is mostly comical, but things get more sinister once everyone boards the train. Iris is suffering from mental fogginess due to an accidental injury, and this is compounded by the hypnotic effects of the train’s motion. She soon falls asleep and, upon awakening, notices that Miss Froy is gone. But everyone says they haven’t seen any person such as she is describing and she must be imagining things due to that bump of her head. The gaslighting seems to be a conspiracy but these people can’t all know each other, can they? Finally she convinces Gilbert to join in her the search, and in the final third The Lady Vanishes becomes a good old-fashioned thriller.
In the 1930s, the British Board of Film Censors banned controversial political content, including portrayals that might aggravate international tensions. That had to create some interesting tensions by 1938, what with Germany “annexing” Austria in March and the U.K being among the signatories of the Munich Agreement in September. Hitchcock and screenwriters Sidney Gilliat and Frank Launder still managed to sneak some political criticism past the censors by creating characters that exemplified different approaches to crisis, from appeasement to isolation to risking yourself for a righteous cause. Comparing the fates of the different characters to the attitude they took toward the crisis in the story makes it perfectly clear what side this film was on.
The characters of Charters and Caldicott were invented for this film ( they don’t appear in the source novel The Wheel Spins by Ethel Lina White) and this double act proved so popular that Radford and Wayne appeared under the same names in three other films: Night Train to Munich (1940), Crooks Tour (1941), and Millions Like Us (1943). They also appeared together in four other films, sometimes playing very similar characters with different names: Dead of Night (1945), Quartet (1948), Passport to Pimlico (1949), and It’s Not Cricket (1949). | Sarah Boslaugh
Spine #: 3
Technical details: 96 min.; B&W; screen ratio 1.33:1; English.
Edition reviewed: DVD (2 discs).
Extras: audio commentary by film historian Bruce Eder; video essay “Mystery Train” by Hitchcock scholar Leonard Leff; excerpts from the famous 1962 interview between François Truffaut and Alfred Hitchcock; stills gallery; Crook’s Tour (1941), a feature film including the characters Charters and Caldicott; and an illustrated booklet with essays by Geoffrey O’Brien and Charles Barr.
Fun Fact: Harold Lohner designed the Gainsborough Font in imitation of the hand-lettered title credits for The Lady Vanishes; the distinctive lower-case “g” is the key to identifying this font.
Parting Thought: The Lady Vanishes was a big hit in its day and has retained its popularity over the years. Yet once you see the supposedly banned political criticism in The Lady Vanishes, you can’t unsee it, and some of it is aimed at identifiable officials in the British government of the day. So did the censors just miss it because they were not, as screenwriter Jay Presson Allen once noted, exactly rocket scientists, or did they let it slip through on purpose since much of Europe was already preparing for war?
