The Lady Vanishes

Alfred Hitchcock’s The Lady Vanishes is a railway thriller in which the other passengers can be as obstructive as the mystery. It is also a comedy that gives those passengers enough room to be funny without forgetting the missing woman. We recommend it for the way those two kinds of scene work together: a conversation can amuse us and still make us suspicious of the people having it. The plotting occasionally becomes fussy, but the search keeps its urgency.

Margaret Lockwood gives Iris Matilda Henderson the determination the film needs. As she and Gilbert Redman, played by Michael Redgrave, search the Balkan express for Miss Froy, played by May Whitty, there is a practical task to follow beneath the complications. The two leads keep our attention on that task while allowing the comedy to remain part of the search rather than an interruption. Their exchanges make it possible to enjoy the company without settling down quite as comfortably as the passengers would like.

Frank Launder and Sidney Gilliat’s screenplay gives the supporting players interests beyond solving somebody else’s problem. Basil Radford’s Charters and Naunton Wayne’s Caldicott are occupied with cricket, which makes them funny company and doubtful assistance. We laughed at their preoccupation, then felt uneasy about how readily we had accepted it: a woman is missing and their attention is elsewhere. The joke works because their priorities are recognisable, even when their conduct is hard to defend.

Jack E. Cox uses the confined train spaces to make the search feel awkward and exposed. The carriages keep people close enough for ordinary chatter to distract from a clue, and Alfred Hitchcock makes us attend to conversations we might otherwise dismiss. R.E. Dearing’s editing gives the dialogue time to register while keeping the investigation moving. The geography matters here: we can understand the limits of the space without knowing what has happened inside it.

The music credited to Charles Williams and Louis Levy suits the changes between comedy and threat, though it is the dialogue we remember most clearly. The weaker passages come when the plotting needs more explanation than the characters’ behaviour can comfortably provide. Those complications are handled briskly, but a little impatience creeps in when we start attending to how the mystery has been arranged instead of the people caught in it. The broader melodrama is less interesting than the petty reasons for staying uninvolved.

The jokes about the British have particular force in a thriller released in 1938, when ignoring trouble beyond one’s own immediate concerns was hardly an innocent habit. But they work without asking us to supply a history lesson, because the passengers’ selfishness is clear in their conversation. Against the railway mystery’s familiar business of clues and suspects, these competing priorities give us more to watch than the puzzle. At 96 minutes, it asks little patience for its occasional complications. Watch it with someone who enjoys a dry joke as much as a disappearance.