Hitchcock surrounding himself with beauty on the set of The Lady Vanishes, 1938
Hitchcock on the set with Dame May Whitty and Emile Boreo
Hitchcock on the set with Margaret Lockwood
Hitchcock with Margaret Lockwood
Hitchcock cameo
THE LADY VANISHES A-
Great Britain (97
mi) 1938
d: Alfred Hitchcock
I don’t see how a
thing like cricket can make you forget seeing people.
—Charters (Basil Radford)
When one thinks of Hitchcock’s greatest films, they usually
revolve around Shadow
of a Doubt (1943), NOTORIOUS (1946), STRANGERS ON A TRAIN (1951), REAR
WINDOW (1954), Vertigo
(1958), NORTH BY NORTHWEST (1959), and Psycho
(1960), where his British films rarely enter into the discussion. British film critic David Thomson, for
instance, acknowledges that “Hitchcock in England is a career unto itself,” but
does not include any of the British films on his list of the director's
greatest works. David Denby writing for The New Yorker wrote, “In recent
decades, critical consensus has settled on the American movies from the
fifties.” That means Dial
M for Murder (1954), The
Trouble With Harry (1955), The
Wrong Man (1956), The Birds
(1960), and even Rebecca
(1940) are often mentioned before his British classics The Lodger
(1927), Blackmail
(1929), THE MAN WHO KNEW TOO MUCH (1934), The 39
Steps (1935), Young
and Innocent (1937), and what is arguably his most definitively British
film, THE LADY VANISHES (1938). Ironically
the film originated with an American director, Roy William Neill, for a film
called The Lost Lady, produced by
Edward Black, where a crew was sent to former Yugoslavia for initial background
shots, but the police interfered, thinking Yugoslavs were not being
well-portrayed in the film, so they were booted out of the country. A year later, Black offered the film to
Hitchcock, which features an exquisite screenplay enhanced by Sidney Gilliat
and Frank Launder, who turned it into one of his best British films. Hitchcock actually received a cable in the
middle of shooting this film from producer David O. Selznick in America asking
him to come to Hollywood to direct a picture and the rest is history. Unlike Fritz Lang’s master criminal in his
thrillers who has the capability to cloud other men’s minds through hypnosis
and disguise, creating hallucinogenic qualities, Hitchcock often uses a luring
spirit from beyond the grave, such as the ghostly presence of Rebecca
(1940), or Madeleine/Carlotta in Vertigo
(1958), Mrs. Bates in Psycho
(1960), not to mention the lingering presence of the cadavers in ROPE (1948),
REAR WINDOW (1954), and The
Trouble With Harry (1955). Meeting
Hitchcock in Hollywood a few years after THE LADY VANISHES, British-American
actor and film producer John Houseman found him to be “a man of exaggeratedly
delicate sensibilities, marked by…the scars from a social system against which
he was in perpetual revolt and which had left him suspicious and vulnerable,
alternately docile and defiant.” Hitchcock
was born and raised in London, where according to author and academic Charles
Barr in his Criterion essay, The
Lady Vanishes: Tea and Treachery:
The son of a tradesman, Hitchcock
was exposed to the subtle brutalities of the English class system from an early
age, both in his own education and as a precocious London theatergoer
fascinated by the work of such anatomists of English society as Shaw and John
Galsworthy. Like any British filmmaker
of the period, he could hardly have avoided class issues when he began as a
director in 1926, and his films show a consistent sharpness in handling them,
in particular the tensions created by relationships across a class divide, as
in the silent films The Lodger
(1927) and The
Manxman (1929) and the early sound films Murder!
(1930) and The Skin
Game (1931).
While Hitchcock was a Londoner at heart, he was also European
and cosmopolitan, traveling frequently whenever possible, influenced both by
key elements within his national culture as well as formative cinematic
influences from elsewhere, such as German expressionism, Hollywood cinema, and
Soviet montage. So it should perhaps
come as no surprise that this film is a beautiful composite of these various
cultural influences, adapted from the 1936 novel The Wheel Spins by Ethel Lina White, where the film is a romantic
espionage thriller that was largely a metaphor for the peace that was about to
vanish in Europe. The film was made in
the same year as Chamberlain’s infamous appeasement to Nazi Germany in the Munich
Agreement, symbolizing the failure of the West to prevent the annexation
and eventual occupation of Czechoslovakia which would be doomed to seven years
of Nazi domination, but also Poland’s subsequent invasion in 1939, conditions
that lead to the outbreak of World War II.
The film is set in the fictional mountains of an unnamed European
country, where the trains have stopped running as an avalanche has stranded the
mostly British characters in a picturesque mountain resort, introduced in near
storybook fashion where the mountainous backdrop has obviously been artfully painted,
while the initial shots zooming into the snowbound village, “one of Europe’s
few undiscovered corners,” is clearly a miniature set, featuring toy trains,
powdered snow, and frozen figurines, all adding a touch of playfulness. While the early hotel scenes play out as a
comedy of manners, a British comic farce with Hitchcock deriving pleasure at
the misfortunes of the British travelers having to put up with the discomforts
and confusions of life abroad, as the hotel is besieged by panicked customers
who will need another night’s accommodations, the film is essentially a train
journey of British passengers anxious to get home who form a microcosm of
English society, all filmed in one train car (the rest were miniatures or
artificially realized), where the audience becomes absorbed by the characters
and the story. Charters and Caldicott
(Basil Radford and Naunton Wayne), are an amusing gay couple who represent the
idle rich, the same ruling classes that are working to appease Hitler, where
they are more worried about a cricket match than the concerns of others. Stalled at the desk waiting for a room, they
are appalled at the attention given to several spoiled and attractive young
girls whose idea of wealth is marrying into it, somehow detesting this idea, as
represented by the young and beautiful heroine, Iris Henderson (Margaret
Lockwood), an heiress returning home to marry some fabulously wealthy, father-approved
Lord who comes with a title and his own coat-of-arms, celebrating her last
night with champagne.
Miss Froy (Dame May Whitty) is the elderly, but surprisingly
spry governess enthralled by the local music, and if you blink you’ll miss that
the musician she is listening to on the streets below is snuffed out in an
instant, unseen by anyone, adding a gripping element of terror to the nonstop comedy,
where in this film Hitchcock cleverly disguises and prolongs the sense of
urgency from an existing, though largely unseen danger that could threaten all
their lives, yet the rising tension is balanced by breezy, lighthearted British
comedy throughout. Musicologist Gilbert,
Michael Redgrave in his first starring role, rudely refuses to stop making
plenty of racket in his room above Iris, where the two begin as arch enemies,
bickering incessantly, though in that delightfully cultivated British sense of
humor. Both Gilbert and Miss Froy are
coy about their class status, neither one mentioning their past, though both
are cultured and well educated. Finally
there is Mr. Todhunter (Cecil Parker), perhaps a lawyer of some sort and his
attractive female companion, aka Mrs. Todhunter (Linden Travers), where both
are probably cheating on their respective spouses and more concerned about not
being detected. Just before they board
the train, Iris has just been hit over the head by a second story window
planter that appears to have been intentionally dropped, though likely
targeting someone else. Miss Froy takes
her under her wing and looks after her on the train, offering her some tea, the
British cure for everything. Falling
asleep afterwards, by the time she awakes, Miss Froy has vanished. Iris searches the train, but all the other
passengers deny ever having seen her, while documents have apparently been
forged by the wait staff to suggest Iris earlier had tea alone. All of this is a growing mystery, where the
only person to come to her aid is Gilbert, who feels it’s the only right and
honorable thing to do, to help a lady in distress. They run into a brick wall, however, where some people
have their own private reasons not to get involved, while others are secret collaborators
in a Nazi spy ring, but Iris grows more hysterical by the minute, eventually
pulling the lever to stop the train.
This draws the ire of most passengers, who begin to think of her as that
crazy lady, where Paul Lukas, winner of the Academy Award for Best Actor for
WATCH ON THE RHINE (1943), beating out Humphrey Bogart from CASABLANCA (1942),
plays a seemingly compassionate brain surgeon Dr. Hartz who attributes the
problem to the bump on her head, claiming it’s a very common Freudian symptom
for those suffering from concussion-related hallucinations and offers to treat
her at his clinic later that same evening.
The viewer has every reason to believe Iris is going out of
her mind, even though evidence seen with our own eyes suggests otherwise, where
something sinister hangs in the air. To
unravel the mystery, they search every car and every compartment, where they
even discover another woman dressed exactly like Miss Froy, which only adds to
the intrigue. It has the macabre underground
atmosphere of Peter Lorre and Sydney Greenstreet who specialize in the art of
the double-cross, always meeting in secrecy while conducting shady business
transactions, as there’s a cloud of suspicion hanging over everyone’s
head. By a process of elimination, they
have only to confirm the identity of Dr. Hartz’s patient, whose face is wrapped
in bandages, guarded by a Catholic nun (Catherine Lacy), reportedly deaf and
dumb, though later we hear her speaking perfectly, actually changing sides and
helping the British couple, a similar theme initiated earlier in Number
Seventeen (1932). A key clue gives
the nun away, opening the door to new possibilities, actually saving their
lives when the doctor, who turns out to be a cold-blooded Nazi agent, thinks
the snooping team is getting too close, miraculously finding Miss Froy
underneath all those bandages, while exchanging patients with the woman wearing
her identical clothes, replacing the bandages over her face. As the doctor gets off with his patient at
his intended stop, however, he discovers something is amiss, where we see him
speaking to various military officials.
While for a moment Miss Froy is free to breathe again, Gilbert makes an
announcement to the British passengers in the train’s dining car just as they
are having tea (of course) explaining the nefarious activities of the good
doctor who attempted to kidnap Miss Froy, suggesting they all may be in trouble. With this announcement, the dining car has
been separated from the train and shifted to a side track, where it rolls to a
stop in the middle of a forest. Cars can
be seen through the trees, along with Dr. Hartz and several military men, where
the reaction of the group mimics the standard European reaction to the growing
Nazi threat, suggesting things like this don’t happen, they seem like
reasonable sorts, perhaps we could reason with them, where Todhunter proclaims
with the same assurance as Mrs. Bundy (Ethel Griffies), the bird expert in The Birds
(1960), “They can’t possibly do anything to us.
We’re British subjects.” Leave it
to the gayest character on the train, Caldicott, to retort, “Pacifist? Won’t work. Christians tried it and got thrown to the
lions.” But as the soldiers quickly
advance with guns pointed, Gilbert fires at them before allowing armed men to
take over the train. Disregarding the
warnings of others, Todhunter takes the appeasement route and declares, “This
is madness, I’ll go out and speak to them,” but he’s shot on the spot, despite
carrying a white handkerchief.
There on that train, in the middle of some nameless forest,
a firefight breaks out. It’s only then
that Miss Froy reminds them all, “You shouldn’t judge any country by its
politics. We English are quite honest by nature,” revealing she is
carrying government secrets, which have been coded into a musical melody that
she heard out her window that night, quickly teaching it to Gilbert before she
escapes out the back way. Leave it to
the oldest among them to show her true colors, reminding the embattled group that
it will take all of them to stand up to this fascist scourge. Only by banding together, instead of meekly
minding their own business, are they able to change the dark tide, but only
through the self-sacrifice of the only working class Brit aboard, where no one
in this group even recognizes a lower-class London accent, disguised earlier as
the foreign nun, as she turns out to be a civilian Englishwoman that helps save
the day. This is a different kind of
espionage film, unlike the gun-toting, misogynistic, martini-drinking James
Bond films, as this represents a far more accurate portrayal of the enormous
contribution made by female intelligence agents. Bletchley
Park where the Allies decrypted the Nazi codes during WW II was largely run
by women, where Churchill referred to these invaluable women as being “the
geese who laid the golden eggs, but did not cackle.” American chef and television personality
Julia Child worked for the American Office of Strategic Services (OSS) during
the war, working directly for the head of OSS, General William J. Donovan. In much the same way, Charters and Caldicott,
the cricket obsessed gay Brits who are the most jovial couple in the film, rise
to the occasion and prove to be patriotic Englishmen who do not hesitate to use
force to defend themselves. They clearly
foreshadow the role of the great British mathematician Alan Turing,
the subject of THE IMITATION GAME (2014), a brilliantly educated gay man who
devised a number of groundbreaking techniques for breaking German codes. Winston Churchill said Turing made the single
biggest contribution to the Allied victory in the war against Nazi Germany. Nonetheless, showing the depths of how depraved
and empty-headed government cabinet ministers can be (a view likely shared by
Hitchcock), Turing was prosecuted for homosexuality in 1952. In something out of Kubrick’s A
Clockwork Orange (1971), as an alternative to prison, he accepted what
amounts to chemical castration by taking female hormone injections, dying two
years later from cyanide poisoning. It
took until 2009 for Prime Minister Gordon Brown to make an official government
apology for “the appalling way he was treated.” The Queen also granted him a posthumous pardon
in 2013. Like Renoir’s RULES OF THE GAME
(1939) made a year later, there’s a special significance for these films coming
on the dawn of World War II, as they are, among other things, a prophetic
commentary on the troubled times, anticipating the cataclysmic events to come,
while also serving as a clarion call to arms against the forces of
fascism.
Note – The Hitchcock cameo comes at the 92-minute mark where
Hitchcock, wearing a black coat and puffing on a cigarette, is seen walking on
the platform of London’s Victoria Station as Iris and Gilbert are returning to
the city.
