Anniversary Edition
Though it won't be celebrating its 70th birthday until next year, an anniversary edition of Alfred Hitchcock's The Lady Vanishes can already be found on retailers' shelves, prompted, no doubt, by the advent of the holidays.
What more perfect gift upon which to bestow the Classic Film buff but this, one of the most witty, whirlwind and well-balanced motion pictures in cinematic history.
Propagandistic Thrill Ride
Despite its age, The Lady Vanishes does not creak like a rusted train wheel. It huffs and puffs, rather, like the undaunted locomotive upon which the film's action is set. This propagandistic thrill ride is as hale, colorful and endearing a 70-year-old as the sweet-faced senior citizen whose disappearance is the story's centre-piece. The lady vanishes, not tarnishes.
Memorable Characters
In pursuit of the mysteriously missing matriarch is a romantic comedy mismatch to die for: the demurely priggish Margaret Lockwood and the insolently sassy Michael Redgrave. For the record, Redgrave did not make his screen debut in this film. Two years earlier, he had appeared in Hitchcock's Secret Agent.
Together, the two are forced to interrogate the most memorable cast of characters outside of Casablanca (a film it resembles on more than one level.) So familiar are these characters to film buffs it seems ridiculous to mention them; strictly in the interest of making my word quota, then, here goes: Naunton Wayne and Basil Radford as the cricket crazy odd couple, Paul Lukas as the suave, professorial surgeon, Cecil Parker as the nervous barrister, and Linden Travers as his cat-faced mistress.
Sustained Comedy
Each is awarded prize moments of both repartee and tension, though Parker and Travers get short sheeted when it comes to pages of witty banter. Even during the climactic shoot out brought on by the finally-foiled kidnapping there are dry-as-sherry bon mots one tastes long after the film is over - for this is Hitchcock's at his most comically sustained; he would not be inspired to hold the note of comedy for this long again until 1959's North By Northwest.
Great Script
Both films are testaments to the old adage that it takes the great script to get the best out of a director, even one such as naturally talented as Hitchcock. The venerable team of Sidney Gilliatt and Frank Laudner are responsible for the screenplay; together, they converted a routine mystery (Ethel Lina White's The Wheel Spins) into a script that does all that a single narrative can do, almost suggesting that screenwriting can be an exact science.
They even added political relevance. Vanishes served not only a romantic comedy-murder mystery-thriller, but as a populist cry for English intervention into the turmoil that was gripping Europe. When the skittish Parker, waving his white handkerchief at the mock Nazis that are the film's villains, hit the dust courtesy of a well-aimed bullet, it was good riddance, the film was unabashedly announcing, to British isolationism.
All Aboard!
All aboard, then, film buffs (no doubt your umpteenth journey) for Hitchcock's high-spirited train. It's the one form of holiday travel you'll endure without dread.
