Old Movie Time - "The Lady Vanishes" (1938)

In a random post that I recently made on a Facebook movie themed group page, I asked people to name their Top Five Alfred Hitchcock Movies.  For the record, mine were, alphabetically, North By Northwest, Notorious, Psycho, Rear Window, and Vertigo.  A Facebook pal of mine, Bob Cassinelli from Illinois, told me that his list would be identical to mine "if I took out Vertigo and substituted The Lady Vanishes."  As it happens, I had never seen "The Lady Vanishes" so last night, I rectified that oversight and, thanks to the magic of streaming, I watched this 1938 Alfred Hitchcock classic.

"The Lady Vanishes" was one of the last films that Hitchcock made in Great Britain before he left for Hollywood for bigger budgets and even greater fame.  It has all of the Hitchcock trademarks:  a long opening tracking shot, a protagonist who is stating a fact that she knows is true, the audience knows is true, but no one else believes her, a Hitchcock cameo appearance, and, of course, a Maguffin around which the whole sequence of events revolve, but is essentially inconsequential to the story.

It opens in a hotel in a train station somewhere in the Balkans where an avalanche has delayed the train scheduled to head west and eventually to England.  Because of the delay, all passengers have to stay overnight at the hotel, and this enables Hitchcock to introduce the cast of characters....Iris Henderson (Margaret Lockwood), a young Englishwoman just completing a tour of Europe where she seemed to sow some wild oats with two girlfriends and is now headed back to England to marry and settle down with some dreadfully dull Englishman....Gilbert Redman (Michael Redgrave), a somewhat flighty musician who is writing a book about obscure European folk music....Miss Froy (Dame May Whitty), a elderly English governess....Mr. and "Mrs." Todhunter, and adulterous couple headed back home....Messrs. Caldicott and Charters, two straight-out-of-central-casting oblivious Englishmen who want nothing but to get back home for some important cricket matches.  There are others as well who will play significant roles in the adventure that begins the next morning when they all finally board the train and head for Jolly Old England.

Redgrave, Whitty, Lockwood

Iris, who received a nasty bump on the noggin just before boarding, becomes friendly with Mrs. Froy while sharing a compartment with her and four other passengers and has a spot of tea with her in the club car.  When they return to their compartment, Iris falls asleep, and when she awakens, Mrs Froy is gone, and not only doesn't anyone know where she is, everybody insists that there is, and never was, such a lady.  That bump on the head has surely caused Iris to imagine the entire thing, and she had better consult with a doctor when she gets home, or, better yet, consult with Dr. Hartz, an eminent "brain doctor" who just happens to be on the same train.

Iris then takes up with Gilbert, whom she took an immediate disliking to the previous night in the hotel, to find Mrs. Froy, and, not incidentally, find out just what in the bloody hell is going on here.  Most of the movie takes place within the confines of a moving train (something that we would see Hitchcock employ later on in Strangers On A Train, Shadow of a Doubt, and North by Northwest), and that adds to the suspense.  Did I mention that it's 1938 and that we are in Europe, albeit in a fictional country?  Some allusions are made to just what is taking place in Europe at that time, so that means that there must be SPIES involved in all of this right?  Ahh, that's the Maguffin that I mentioned above.  Oh, and what about that marriage between Iris and her stuffy boring English gentleman?  You are going to have to watch the movie yourself to find that out.

The story does indeed resolve itself, and if you are like I was and have never seen this movie, I certainly won't spoil it for you, but it is quite a good one, and it is one, I suspect, that I will come to enjoy even more upon repeated viewings.  It doesn't crack my Hitchcock Top Five, but I will give it three Stars on The Grandstander's Four Star scale, and I again thank Bob Cassinelli for prompting me to seek it out and watch it.

Some other observations....

Margaret Lockwood

• I was completely unfamiliar with Margaret Lockwood, but after watching, I did a little research.  She was only 21 years old when she made this film.  She was quite pretty and a very smart and spunky Hitchcock heroine, not at all  the cool icy blonde that became such a Hitchcock trademark.
• She moved on to Hollywood and found little success on this side of the Atlantic, so she quickly returned to Great Britain, and made a career playing mostly vampy, "bad girl" roles.    She died in 1990 at the age of 73.
• The characters of Caldicott and Charters, provided a great bit of comic relief to "The Lady Vanishes", yet still played a significant role in the story.  They were played by actors Naunton Wayne and Basil Radford, and their characters were so well received by the movie going public, that they were teamed up by British filmmakers and made ten other movies together over the course of their careers.  Not sure if they were on the same level of Hope and Crosby, but jolly good for them.
• Dame May Whitty.  Whenever I hear her name I think of Johnny Carson's "Mighty Carson Art Players" bit when he played Art Fern doing the Tea Time Movies.  He would always list preposterously named movies that starred a string of actors whose names rhymed with each other.  Invariably, some of the movies would always star "Dame May Whitty and Conway Twitty."
• "The Lady Vanishes" has been remade at least three times that I could find.  The most interesting bit of casting was a 1979 American version that starred Elliott Gould, Cybill Shepard, and Angela Lansbury.
• Bob Cassinelli, whose comment inspired this post, attended Northern Illinois University.  At first, I thought this was pretty cool because that's where Tony Romo went.  WRONG!  After double checking, I see that Romo went to Eastern Illinois.  However, Bob's alma mater produced some other famous fellow alums...Dennis Hastert, ex-Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives,  who ended up in the slammer for doing some very unspeakable things, Dan Castellaneta who provides the voice of Homer Simpson, and perhaps most significant of all for movie fans, actress Cindy Morgan, who played Lacy Underall, the sexy niece of Judge Smails in "Caddyshack."  Now THAT is brushing with greatness!