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The Lady Vanishes (Alfred Hitchcock, 1938)
🕑 Added 2021-04-29 18:04:20 +0000 UTC
"There is definitely something queer on this train..."
I don't know that I have a great deal to say about The Lady Vanishes beyond my one-sentence Letterboxd review, which declares this film to be the greatest ever Scooby-Doo episode. In a lot of ways, this film sets the terms for thousands of other jury-rigged whodunnits and bottle-episode mysteries, in the sense that Hitchcock is formally articulating the reversals and misdirections of classic Agatha Christie without any overt content. The Lady Vanishes is one big MacGuffin.
In fact, the shenanigans of the entire first act, where some of our train passengers are stranded at a tiny chateau in the Alps, has virtually nothing to do with the remaining hour-and-ten. We get a protracted meet-cute between Iris (Margaret Lockwood) and Gilbert (Michael Redgrave) that is so buried beneath other activity that it's unclear until much later that these two will be our primary protagonists. In fact, during this period Hitchcock devotes just as much attention to the cricket-loving gay chaps (Naunton Wayne and Basil Radford) as he does to the eventual couple.
What's more, the plot relies on so many random machinations that the whole film seems to operate a bit like a magic trick that is being explained while you watch it unfold. The fact that one of the minor villains is an Italian magician (Philip Leaver), and that he is part of the overall misdirection, is a wonderfully droll meta-commentary on the film's functioning. The train delay, the cramped accommodations, and above all the planter pushed out of the high window by invisible hands and onto Iris's head -- all of this is played as one screwball pitch after another. The script, and Hitchcock's timing and focus, both hover in a nebulous state, in which we can simultaneously admire the way the pieces fall into place, and still feel as if it's being made up on the spot.
The only place where this open-source plotting falls flat, in my opinion, is in the eventual revelation about Miss Froy (May Whitty). It would have been more satisfying if her role in the elaborate caper had been discovered by accident, or if it really were a case of mistaken identity. As it stands, the Froy problem is attributable to her outright lying, which hardly seems fair to the viewer. If you're purporting to lay all the puzzle pieces out on the table, it's not very sporting to just keep one in your pocket.
