The Lady Vanishes

MOVIE #1,364 • 🍿🍿🍿🍿🍿🍿🍿 • 02.09.24 EVERY OTHER FRIDAY I’M REVIEWING THE COMPLETE WORKS OF ALFRED HITCHCOCK IN CHRONOLOGICAL ORDER. THIS IS TGI-HITCHOCK! This plot is kind of a pointless exercise, isn't it? Or at the very least: needlessly convoluted. This is a major film in the Hitchcock chronology, though, as its success directly led to his coming to Hollywood, and it's clearly well-made. My inability to connect with the plot/mystery might be on me, in other words. As the case with many of Hitchcock’s movies thus far, I found the comic notes to be DOA (it marks the debut of the English comedy duo, Charters and Caldicott, whose whole schtick is that they're huge cricket fans? which is funny because?? I simply can’t account for these gaps in culture, minus 85 years and counting).

The whole thing turns out to be a spy fiasco (they wait till the final minutes to reveal this major plot point — spoiler: it's the vanished [old] lady), typical 30s Hitchcock fodder. I suppose this is an interesting way to go about it, and I definitely enjoyed some of the shots/sequences (lovely miniatures built on the same set as Young and Innocent and neat rear-projection on the moving train, and sometimes both at once) but I didn't totally connect with it.

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CHRONOLOGICALLY
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The Lady Vanishes is a 1938 British mystery thriller film directed by Alfred Hitchcock, starring Margaret Lockwood and Michael Redgrave. Written by Sidney Gilliat and Frank Launder, based on the 1936 novel The Wheel Spins by Ethel Lina White, the film is about an English tourist travelling by train in continental Europe who discovers that her elderly travelling companion seems to have disappeared from the train. After her fellow passengers deny ever having seen the elderly lady, the young woman is helped by a young musicologist, the two proceeding to search the train for clues to the old lady's disappearance. It was released on October 7, 1938.