The Strange Case of the Vanishing Lady

If good ol’ imdb.com is correct, and you know they never lie, you’ll see that Alfred Hitchcock directed some 65 features.  Of those, the first 24 were made in his native Britain, before he and his family moved to California for good.  The penultimate feature made before the move was The Lady Vanishes, and for many, it’s the best of his pre-Hollywood years.

Although I’m not in a position to judge that claim, having seen only a few of his pre-war features, for my money Lady is one one of Hitch’s most purely entertaining films, period.  It is a tightly plotted, highly-efficient exercise in (a) drumming up suspense and (b) igniting chemistry between two sexy stars: Margaret Lockwood and Michael Redgrave.  Lockwood plays Iris Henderson, a callow playgirl traveling home to London to marry some House-of-Lords stiff named Charles.  Redgrave is Gilbert, a free spirit who is (of course) the opposite of everything Iris (of course) holds dear.

They meet cute in a mountain hotel in an imaginary European nation in political turmoil.  Iris’ train has been trapped in the snow, and Gilbert is engaged in a quest to document the indigenous folk music of the country’s happy citizens.  She is trying to get a good night’s sleep, he is upstairs presiding over an impromptu clogging session, and as is mandatory in these affairs, it’s love at first fight.

Meanwhile, strange doings are afoot.  Sweet old Miss Froy (Dame May Whitty) befriends Iris, and they take a compartment together on the train.  While Iris sleeps, the old lady up and disappears, and nobody in their compartment sees her go.  But here’s the thing:  no one in their compartment — or the entire train, for that matter — will admit to ever seeing the old lady in the first place.  Strange doings, indeed.

All of this is played with a light-hearted, romantic comedy vibe, as Gilbert gallantly takes Iris under his wing, and while they solve the mystery they come to respect and (dare I say it?) love one another. Solving the mystery,  it turns out, isn’t really that hard at all, but in case you’re one of the three people in the world who hasn’t seen it, I won’t give it away.

Along the way, we meet up with colorful characters,  among them a world-renowned surgeon (Paul Lukas), an Italian magician (Philip Leaver), and a nun who wears designer high heels (Catherine Lacey).  And half the fun is noting who is in on the conspiracy and who is just obfuscating for their own selfish reasons.

In the latter category are two English soccer fans, Caldicott (Naunton Wayne) and Charters (Basil Radford), who steal every scene they are in.  They are there as comic relief and as foils for the filmmakers’ agenda of skewering British cluelessness and entitlement.  They are perpetually befuddled by anything un-English, and hilariously single-minded about returning to London  in time for a soccer tournament.

Caldicott and Charters are also the focus of Hitchcock’s oft-noted penchant for gay subtext.  But in this case, it’s much more text than sub: in the hotel, circumstances conspire to force them to share a room with the upstairs maid. When the blithely innocent woman comes  in to change her clothes, Hitch cuts to the boys together in the room’s one bed; one of them is shirtless and we can clearly see the pants of the other, hanging next to the bed. In another sequence, we see a male extra come out of the train’s tiny bathroom, and then Caldicott pokes his head out, urging Charters inside to hide.  What is fascinating about it all is that in spite of this, the two became beloved characters in British cinema, appearing together in three other films.  One of which, 1940’s Crook’s Tour, is a bonus on the Criterion release of The Lady Vanishes.

A major contributor to the success of Lady is its screenplay, by Sidney Gilliat and Frank Launder.  It is lean and efficient, and reminds us of all that can be accomplished in 96 minutes;  would that some of today’s bloated “thrillers” learn that lesson.  Hitchock shoots it all with his characteristic style and wit, but unlike his later films, it is a sunny affair, with a hero and heroine  uncomplicated by doubts and untortured by their pasts.  You have to think — and of course this is hardly original to me — that World War II changed all that, and contributed to the cold-war paranoiac we all know and love.

There is something wonderful about The Lady Vanishes, something guileless about it’s charms.  Of course everything comes out OK in the end; even the villains turn out to be not all that bad.  Critic Robin Wood, in an essay for the film’s Criterion release, calls it one of Hitchcock’s “most perfect films” and says

If there is no chapter on The Lady Vanishes in my book on Hitchcock, this is purely because it is too perfect, so transparent that there is little to say. The labyrinthine complexities of Vertigo were far away.

And — no offense to Vertigo and its legions of fans — I’m glad of that.  Sometimes you just want a well-produced, delightfully-acted entertainment, and on that score, The Lady Vanishes delivers.