The Lady Vanishes: the train thriller that carried Hitchcock to Hollywood
A young Englishwoman dozes off on a train crossing Europe. When she wakes, the kindly older lady sharing her compartment has gone, and every passenger swears she never existed. Alfred Hitchcock's 1938 thriller The Lady Vanishes caught Hollywood's eye, and he left Britain soon after it came out.
The project began without him. Under the title The Lost Lady, producer Edward Black assigned it to director Roy William Neill and sent a crew to Yugoslavia for background shots, but local police, discovering they came off badly in the script, threw the crew out and the film was shelved. A year later Hitchcock needed something to fulfil his contract with Black and took it on, tightening the opening and ending with writers Sidney Gilliat and Frank Launder and, as often, his wife Alma Reville. The script has been hailed as one of the most perfect ever written.
In the story, Iris Henderson, heading home from the invented country of Bandrika to marry, befriends a governess, Miss Froy. After Miss Froy disappears, only a clarinet-playing ethnomusicologist, Gilbert, eventually believes Iris, persuaded when a wrapper from Miss Froy's favourite tea sticks to a window. The missing lady turns out to be a British spy carrying a message hidden in a tune. Ethel Lina White's source novel, The Wheel Spins, was quite different: there Miss Froy is an innocent, Iris is confused by sunstroke, and the train never stops. Viewers have read the finished film as a comment on the drift toward war, with reluctant Britons finally banding together against the aggressors.
Casting built careers. Margaret Lockwood, then little known but being groomed as a star by Black, took the lead, and Michael Redgrave, a rising stage actor talked into films by John Gielgud, became an international star, though he clashed with Hitchcock over rehearsals. The film also introduced Charters and Caldicott, a pair of cricket-obsessed Englishmen fretting about a Test match in Manchester, and Hitchcock himself appears near the end at Victoria Station.
Shot at Gainsborough Studios in Islington, it was the first feature released under a deal in which MGM paid half the budget. The British Film Institute ranks it the 35th best British film of the 20th century.
Source: The Lady Vanishes
