'The Lady Vanishes' is one of the last films made by Hitchcock before crossing the ocean and starting his American career. It used to be one of the preferred Hitchcock films of Francois Truffaut who confessed in his book of dialogs with Hitchcock to know it by heart. I had great expectations before seeing it, and I frankly was disappointing.
The idea of the film is fantastic, and the film starts a genre or maybe two - the train (or other closed space) thriller and the denied disappearing where we the viewers and the hero are the only ones who believe in the reality of what we have seen - the combination that was lately used again in 'Fightplan'.
The problem here is with the combination and ratio between comedy and thriller. The British humor mixed with national stereotypes that may have been enjoyed by the 1930s viewers did not work at all with me. The two principal characters played by Margaret Lockwood and Michael Redgrave are quite credible, and May Witty justifies the Dame put before her name, but the rest of the actors are no more that sketches filling in the screen with conventional and sometimes wooden acting. There is little thrill in the whole film especially after the secret of the disappearing is dispersed, there is none of the famous Hitchcock suspense scenes that we can remember, and the final action scenes look completely amateurish (what happened with the Nazi officer with a a gun with one bullet at hand in the train?).
This film may have spoken actual messages by the time it was made. An appeasing lawyer is shot and killed while trying to surrender - a clear message for the contemporary audiences in England or the US a few weeks after the Munich agreement. Yet for the viewers today there is too little good cinema to keep beyond the truly original idea of the script.
The idea of the film is fantastic, and the film starts a genre or maybe two - the train (or other closed space) thriller and the denied disappearing where we the viewers and the hero are the only ones who believe in the reality of what we have seen - the combination that was lately used again in 'Fightplan'.
The problem here is with the combination and ratio between comedy and thriller. The British humor mixed with national stereotypes that may have been enjoyed by the 1930s viewers did not work at all with me. The two principal characters played by Margaret Lockwood and Michael Redgrave are quite credible, and May Witty justifies the Dame put before her name, but the rest of the actors are no more that sketches filling in the screen with conventional and sometimes wooden acting. There is little thrill in the whole film especially after the secret of the disappearing is dispersed, there is none of the famous Hitchcock suspense scenes that we can remember, and the final action scenes look completely amateurish (what happened with the Nazi officer with a a gun with one bullet at hand in the train?).
This film may have spoken actual messages by the time it was made. An appeasing lawyer is shot and killed while trying to surrender - a clear message for the contemporary audiences in England or the US a few weeks after the Munich agreement. Yet for the viewers today there is too little good cinema to keep beyond the truly original idea of the script.