Thriller Thursdays: The Lady Vanishes - An Alfred Hitchcock masterpiece

In our weekly column, Thriller Thursdays, we recommend specially-curated thrillers that’ll send a familiar chill down your spine.

When one of the typical upper-lip English characters in The Lady Vanishes talks about how long the Hungarian national anthem was, and another chips in to say that he did not think “Hungarian Rhapsody” was really the Hungarian national anthem, one knows one is in good hands, and a jolly good ride was pretty much guaranteed. At such junctures, it does seem that the primary delight of a Hitchcock film is not edge-of-the-seat writing but its trenchant humour, drenched as it is in withering elegance.

But on the face of it, it’s not hard to believe that this masterpiece is of a 1930s lineage, with its technical jaggedness compared to the slickness we take for granted today. But it is a momentary aesthetic discomfort, as the sweeping aerial shots of an icy town, in a fictitious country called Bandrika, and a jettisoned train turns into a cheery restaurant, with an assortment of stranded passengers milling for rooms, attention or food from a harried manager. And lo and behold, come three young women from outside. Obviously, the residents of the hotel and the manager’s attention shift completely to them. As one of the Englishmen tells his friend - "Surely Americans". And the other sorely replies “Almighty Dollars, I’m sure.”

The passengers of the postponed train interact, mesh, irritate, pile on, and get along with each other to varying degrees. The American girl (one of the trio), Iris Henderson (Margaret Lockwood), goes loggerheads with a musician Gilbert (Michael Redgrave) who is creating a racket on the floor above and then befriends an old lady Miss Froy (Dame May Witty), who is a co-sufferer of Gilbert’s music.

Things are obviously amiss in all the bonhomie and confusion of the hotel, as a hotel singer soon gets strangled and there is an attempt to do away with Miss Froy with a flower pot which instead hits Iris and knocks her out. The next morning, on the train, Iris and Miss Froy spend time together, but when Iris takes a small nap and wakes up, she finds Miss Froy gone!

Everyone around seems bent on convincing Iris that there was no old lady to begin with, and possibly it was the effect of the concussion she suffered on her head. Iris muddles around, completely befuddled, until she stumbles across proof that she was not mistaken after all. She is able to convince Gilbert about the truth. The film then hurtles into the mystery of the disappearance, and a saga of subterfuge, mendacity and thuggery ensues.

Hitchcock primarily approaches the film as a satire, as he tears into the English obsessions of non-involvement, skewed priorities, and convenient ignorance — sometimes ironically and sometimes with humour. The narrative is easy to follow and the pacing is balanced. The twists are easy to spot and the high voltage denouement, with full of bullets, sound and fury, is entertaining in its continuing delineation of personalities.

Margaret Lockwood swoons beautifully, whilst Michael Redgrave transits seamlessly from being an irritating rogue to roguishly charming. Dame May Witty is adorable and loveable, and the other actors are perfect in their roles. The music is stark because of its sparing use, and the tune of “Colonel Bogey March” as played and hummed is a nice familiar break, adds to the progress of the plot.

The film was a huge hit in both UK and USA when it was released and easily ranks as one of the best British films ever made. Hitchcock won the award for Best Director from the New York Film Critics Circle, which coincidentally was the only directorial award Hitchcock ever received.

Orson Welles allegedly saw this movie 11 times and Francois Truffaut said this was his favourite Hitchcock. And why not? There’s a love story which finds its acme, a mystery which finds its resolution, a lawyer who gets a karmic lesson, and a couple of cricket-obsessed Englishmen who get their just desserts. I doubt if the most fastidious moviegoer could ask for more.

Trivia

1. Jodie Foster’s Flightplan had several plot devices similar to The Lady Vanishes including a moving vehicle, a hallucinating witness and a message on a window amongst some similarities.
2. The manager of the hotel, as shown in the very first scene is multilingual, fluent in English, German, French, Italian and of course the language of the fictional country! It was a fact of life for many hotels in Europe at that time.
3. As was the norm, you can see Alfred Hitchcock right at the end of the film, smoking a cigarette, paunchy in a black coat!

Watch The Lady Vanishes here.

(Views expressed in this piece are those of the author, and do not necessarily represent those of OTTplay)

(Written by Sunil Bhandari, a published poet and host of the podcast ‘Uncut Poetry’)