Criterion Collection #3: The Lady Vanishes (1938)

The Lady Vanishes
Directed By: Alfred Hitchcock
Written By: Sidney Gilliat and Frank Launder

What's striking about Alfred Hitchcock's The Lady Vanishes is how simple it is. It isn't a film that's making really any grand statement on European society, like the first film I reviewed in the Criterion Project. In essence, The Lady Vanishes is a comic mystery thriller, a genre not exactly known for being all that groundbreaking. It’s certainly the most commercial film I have seen from the Criterion Collection so far and also proves to be the most thematically lightweight.

Make no mistake though: The Lady Vanishes is a very important film. It's one of the final British films that Hitchcock would do before moving to the United States. Without its success, Hitchcock would have been less likely to make his masterworks in the United States.

It also happens to be something that many modern thrillers only strive to be: thrilling.

Following English Tourist Iris Henderson, played by Margaret Lockwood, and musicologist Gilbert, played by the charming Michael Redgrave, to find and prove the existence of the former governess Miss Froy after she disappears from a moving train, The Lady Vanishes is essentially a puzzle.

When it comes to the solving of this puzzle, The Lady Vanishes is outstanding. Hitchcock is fantastic at being able to introduce crucial details without making them seem too obvious or contrived, whether it be the introduction of a bandaged burn victim, a seemingly random conversation between two characters, or the mentioning of a characters favorite brand of tea leaves. Amazingly, Hitchcock usually doesn’t put these details off-frame, but shows them at the center of the frame for emphasis. The reason the audience usually doesn't catch them is because they are so well integrated into the narrative that it ends up tricking the audience.

However, while the mystery of The Lady Vanishes is definitely worth mentioning, the most noteworthy element has to be the suspense. The entire third act of the film is a nail bitter, a simple tea time discussion being miraculously more tense than the intense gunfight that follows.

Which isn’t to say that The Lady Vanishes is some reinvention of the wheel. At its core, The Lady Vanishes is as commercial and crowd pleasing as they come. Whether it be the inclusion of the comic relief characters Charters and Caldicott, two cricket obsessed British passengers who would appear in many films afterwards and would even get their own television program, to the unchallenging thematic content, The Lady Vanishes is essentially a comedic thriller, albeit a very masterfully constructed one.  If nothing, The Lady Vanishes proves one thing: regardless of how generic or commercial the content may be; execution is the key to it actually having a legacy beyond its century.