The Lady Vanishes (1938)

Featured Audience Ratings

• moon r

  
  International intrigue blends with romance as two European railway travellers go missing one friend, and everyone who ever saw the lady denies it. Things are kept light and airy, breezy, despite conspiracy theories and knife fights afoot with plenty of comic shots at the expense of… More
  International intrigue blends with romance as two European railway travellers go missing one friend, and everyone who ever saw the lady denies it. Things are kept light and airy, breezy, despite conspiracy theories and knife fights afoot with plenty of comic shots at the expense of stiff upper lip English abroad perception. Was this really made in 1938?!?

• Tim S

  
  I really adore Alfred Hitchcock's drama comedies. They're very entertaining and tend to keep you glued to your seat until you find out what's going on. In this conspiracy theory comedy extravaganza, The Lady Vanishes is Hitchcock at his early best. Margaret Lockwood and… More
  I really adore Alfred Hitchcock's drama comedies. They're very entertaining and tend to keep you glued to your seat until you find out what's going on. In this conspiracy theory comedy extravaganza, The Lady Vanishes is Hitchcock at his early best. Margaret Lockwood and Michael Redgrave are dazzling as a screen duo, and their performances are what gives the film a lot of its value. They're not standout performances or anything, but they keep you locked in. Much of that has to do with the direction, I'm sure. At times the film is laugh out loud funny and at other times a little creepy, which is a perfect combination. My only problem with the film is that once the main narrative thread is resolved, there's still another thirty minutes devoted to the film's subplot. In other words, the film like it ended much earlier than it actually did. Not that it devalues the story; it just goes on a bit more than it needed to. Otherwise, the film is very slick and should delight anyone who's looking to see other Hitchcock films besides his big name ones.

• Chris W

  
  This is Hitch in pretty close to top form. The story is a fun and exciting thriller about a young woman traveling across pre-WWII Europe by train who believes that an older woman she had become acquainted with has suddenly and mysteriously disappeared. To make thigns more frustrating,… More
  This is Hitch in pretty close to top form. The story is a fun and exciting thriller about a young woman traveling across pre-WWII Europe by train who believes that an older woman she had become acquainted with has suddenly and mysteriously disappeared. To make thigns more frustrating, everyone on the train claims the older woman neverexisted and that it's all in the young woman's head. To be fair, the young woman was hit in the head with a flower pot, but still, that doesn't stop her from trying to prove that she's right and everyone else is (for whatever reasons) trying to hide something. Nowadays this plot seems very quaint, familiar, and nothing special, especially since Flightplan borrows so heavily from it. However, I think it's held up quite well over the years, and is definitely somewhere on the high end of the scale for Hitch (either for his 30s period, his British era, or maybe just overall period). The film does start off a little slow and take some time to get going, but once it does, it's just sails right along. There's a good mystery thriller here, some good twists, great atmosphere, and some decent acting. Essentially, this gives you all that you'd expect from a suspenseful mystery thriller, especially one made by the Master of Suspense. All in al, I give it an extremely high B+

• Graham J

  
  Hitchcock directs a great ensemble cast in this hilarious (and ofcourse, suspenseful) 30's classic.

• Alexander D

  
  Good+

• Ken S

  
  Amazing early classic from Hitchcock that's as charming as it is British (and it is very British).

• Daniel M

  
  By the time he made The Lady Vanishes, Alfred Hitchcock had been directing for seventeen years. He had built himself a reputation as a consummate craftsman and made his fair share of mistakes along the way (the bomb scene in Sabotage being one of his biggest regrets). Coming just… More
  By the time he made The Lady Vanishes, Alfred Hitchcock had been directing for seventeen years. He had built himself a reputation as a consummate craftsman and made his fair share of mistakes along the way (the bomb scene in Sabotage being one of his biggest regrets). Coming just before his move to Hollywood and the Oscar success with Rebecca, The Lady Vanishes is a taut, streamlined and emotional thriller with all the classic ingredients out in full force. The Lady Vanishes is a very loose adaptation of The Wheel Spins by Ethel Lina White - so loose, in fact, that almost everything in the film is different. The setting and some of the character names are unchanged, but the rest has been markedly altered - judging by this, for the better. Such decisions tie in with Hitchcock's underlying interest in technique over content: his concern was never with what the story is about, as with how was the best way to tell it. The first plus point of the film is that it takes a relatively simple premise and not only runs with it, but explores it from every conceivable angle in the space of 90 minutes. Even when there's a big shoot-out in the last ten minutes, the film has the strength of its convictions and never feels like the director is giving up on the material. Whereas Flightplan wanted to be taken seriously and ended up hoisted by its own petard, The Lady Vanishes follows through with its premise until Hitchcock is satisfied that the audience's needs have been met. The film contains a number of aspects which foreshadow Hitchcock's better-known work. He would return to dreams and hallucinations a few years later in Spellbound, and both films are rooted in unreliable narrators searching for an identity which may or may not be their own. When Miss Froy is first introduced to Iris, the latter mishears it as Freud, further confirmation of Hitchcock's continued interest in sex, dreams and psychology. Like The 39 Steps before it and Notorious after it, The Lady Vanishes is a classic story of ordinary people caught up in the world of spying by a single chance encounter. And there is a tenuous link with The Birds in a scene halfway through, where Margaret Lockwood and Michael Redgrave are beset upon by pigeons. But the film is also a refinement of existing techniques. The use of shadows in the strangling scene is a development of the gallows sequence in Murder!, while the use of kaleidoscopic vision to depict hallucinations is taken from Fritz Lang's Metropolis. The claustrophobic setting of The Lady Vanishes means that there is much less opportunity for the performers to descend into melodrama. While there is no doubt that their characters are whimsical, they feel genuine and understated, and there are only occasional moments in which our heroine has to be hysterical on cue. At the beginning of the film we are introduced to a host of characters staying in an overcrowded hotel after their train is delayed by an avalanche. We focus on two irascible Englishmen who are frustrated by their failure to be understood and by the lack of appreciation for cricket (they are trying to get home to watch a test match). In one scene the older gentleman hangs up on someone else's phone call because the other party didn't know the score; in another, he makes jibes about Americans having no sense of perspective because the New York Times covers baseball but not cricket. This sense of whimsy is complimented by Hitchcock's use of language as a means of alienation. Many different languages are spoken on screen as a means of making our heroine more isolated. There are no subtitles, and only so many characters can interpret, which is one of the reasons why Iris and Gilbert become friends. This device is a huge influence on the level of trust we have for both our heroine and the other passengers: are people simply misunderstanding her, or do they have something to hide and are using language as a protective barrier? Hitchcock always made a clear distinction between mystery and suspense, with the former being wholly intellectual and the latter emotional. Superficially, The Lady Vanishes could be classed as a mystery, since its plot is based around a search for a missing person, just like a detective searching for the murderer. The story has vague similarities with Murder on the Orient Express: the action takes places on a train with many strangers from different countries, their various stories do not corroborate and in one solution everyone is in on it. But Hitchcock doesn't just settle for a sense of mystery, and as things move forward it is our emotional response which becomes key. The suspense he generates comes from a number of sources. Some of it is down to set-pieces, the most dramatic being Michael Redgrave having out of the train window in the manner of The 39 Steps. Some of it comes from the time restrictions involved - the train moves to various stations, and characters constantly mutter about crossing the border and needing to make connections. And some of it comes from physical constraints - short of jumping out the window, there's no way off a speeding train. But all of these examples work because of the emotional attachment we have to the characters, both in the reluctant romance and the development of Iris' character as she moves from pity and despair to being more determined and resourceful. Like so many of Hitchcock's thrillers, The Lady Vanishes is brilliant at throwing us off the scent, with little touches here and there which appear more significant than eventually transpires. Through a series of cleverly timed edits, we come to believe that the two Englishmen we meet at the start are the ones we should be watching. After Iris and Gilbert pass along a corridor, we see them coming out of a hidden cubicle, as if they were trying to avoid her. Later we see them talking about the pressing need to get back home: these scenes are shot from a more intrusive angle, so that all their talk of 'cricket' could easily be nothing of the sort. Then we come to the twist. It's hardly the most impressive or shocking in cinema, but for a film anchored by an unreliable narrator it handles it very assuredly. Some thrillers, like Shutter Island or Heartless, eventually have to come down on one side or the other and say what was real or true in a often disappointing manner. With The Lady Vanishes, no such moment is necessary because only one version of events can be true. Because we see Miss Froy around other characters before she boards the train, she has to have genuinely disappeared. Had the entire film been set on the train, with no preamble, only then would the other option been remotely viable. On top of all that, The Lady Vanishes is surprisingly funny. Although certain elements have dated, it takes a playful look at national stereotypes, saluting English resolve while sending up the stiff-upper-lip. Michael Redgrave gets all the juiciest lines in a caddish performance which serves as an interesting contrast to his work in The Browning Version or The Dambusters. And then there are the two Englishmen, whom after talking about cricket forever and explaining wickets with sugar cubes, finally get back to London to discover the match was rained off. The Lady Vanishes is a great thriller from a director on the cusp of greatness. It takes a simple, modest premise and rings out the maximum amount of both thrills and tension. The performances are believable, the plot is twisty and compelling, and Hitchcock's direction is assured and professional. Later works would be more experimental, but this remains a highlight of his pre-Hollywood career.

• AJ V

  
  This movie was confusing to me, it has some boring scenes and some exciting scenes, but the ending was strange. Not Hitchcock's best.

• Lewis C

  
  "Well, anyway, I refuse to be discouraged. Faint heart never found old lady." Ah, this was a great movie! One of Hitch's best, and certainly one of his most entertaining. It was funny, thrilling, and just plain old fun to watch. The story is quite simple. A sweet old… More
  "Well, anyway, I refuse to be discouraged. Faint heart never found old lady." Ah, this was a great movie! One of Hitch's best, and certainly one of his most entertaining. It was funny, thrilling, and just plain old fun to watch. The story is quite simple. A sweet old lady disappears on a train, and the only person who admits ever seeing her, is a young woman who met her the night before. As she searches for the old lady, she's helped by a roguish young man, and they soon begin to wonder just who this lady is, where she went, and why on earth would so many people go through so much trouble to make it seem like she never existed. It all makes for a very compelling mystery. The Lady Vanishes features some of the best characters I've ever seen in a Hitchcock film. Margaret Lockwood and Michael Redgrave were great as the two main protagonists, and the witty banter between the two was equaled only by the two dry, cricket-obsessed Englishmen who provided so much of the humor of the film. I found this movie to be similar to Rear Window (no wonder I enjoyed it so much), as there are many subplots among the minor characters that are almost as interesting as the main story. I firmly believe that this is the best I've seen of Hitchcock's early movies. It has everything from shootouts to nuns in high heels. The Lady Vanishes will convert you to being a fan of Alfred, if you're somehow (drugs?) not already.

• Conner R

  
  A very interesting story and probably the third best film Hitchcock made before going to Hollywood. While it has nothing on some of his later work, this takes a relatively simple premise and creates an interesting thriller.

• Bruce B

  
  This is a very early Hitchcock movie (1938). And it surprised me that this is in the Criterion Collection. The movie intertwines every aspect of the movie genre, ie, mystery, drama, comedy, suspense. The added slap stick surprised me coming from Alfred Hitchcock. Also Hitchcock makes… More
  This is a very early Hitchcock movie (1938). And it surprised me that this is in the Criterion Collection. The movie intertwines every aspect of the movie genre, ie, mystery, drama, comedy, suspense. The added slap stick surprised me coming from Alfred Hitchcock. Also Hitchcock makes his brief appearance in this movie, which I will not give away. Don't let the year of this film scare you. The first 10-15 minutes gives you time to relax and adjust to the story and then from there on out, you better not get up for popcorn because the movie takes off. You have a group of people who are trying to board a train, but are held up over night because they are snow bound in the mountains of Europe. Now we set up for a meeting with all those who will later play a part in this film. The next day before boarding the train Iris gets hit on the head from a falling brick meant for Miss Froy, she makes friends with Miss Froy before passing out, after tea and coming to, Miss Froy has disappeared and no one knows here or says they never seen her. So begins the great mystery. Later we find out that Mrs. Froy is a spy and the Germans of course are involve and the bad guys. So you see Hitchcock has woven everything into this movie. 4 stars only because of its age and film quality. My Copy came from the BCI Alfred Hitchcock Legends of Hollywood Collection 12 Movies for $9.95 on Amazon

• Randy T

  
  This reminded me of <i>The 39 Steps</i> in the sense that it's another example of Hitchcock perfecting his technique as a director. In hindsight, one can see flashes of Hitch's signature style that would later shape his more popular classics (i.e.… More
  This reminded me of <i>The 39 Steps</i> in the sense that it's another example of Hitchcock perfecting his technique as a director. In hindsight, one can see flashes of Hitch's signature style that would later shape his more popular classics (i.e. <i>Vertigo</i>, <i>Rear Window</i>, <i>Psycho</i>, etc.). That being said, even as a young, inexperienced, fledgling director, his brilliance shines through.

• danny d

  
  easily one of hitchcocks best films, this is also one of the greatest films ever made. incredible photography, a perfectly crafted and haunting script, a brilliantly chosen cast, and a well thought out plot. there were no holes and the entire film was perfectly executed. to be… More
  easily one of hitchcocks best films, this is also one of the greatest films ever made. incredible photography, a perfectly crafted and haunting script, a brilliantly chosen cast, and a well thought out plot. there were no holes and the entire film was perfectly executed. to be honest, i was nervous the first 30 minutes, and then the last hour was one of the most mind blowing and engaging hours of film that i have ever seen. a perfect masterpiece.

• Stella D

  
  perfectly charming and really funny

• Lady D

  
  Slow starting, but in typical Hitchcock fashion, a great original conspiracy story. Hitchcock certainly loved his trains. An enjoyable film and a rating to reflect the quality for it?s time

• Tim S

  
  Early Hitchcock that has some really cool moving shots that give you a little taste of what is to come later in his career. I like the way he used models in the opening. It's also surprising how funny this movie is, but at the same time I think the plot was a little much at the… More
  Early Hitchcock that has some really cool moving shots that give you a little taste of what is to come later in his career. I like the way he used models in the opening. It's also surprising how funny this movie is, but at the same time I think the plot was a little much at the end. Redgrave is great.

• Lanning :

  
  Clever, a lot of fun, but a little thin. Still it stretches what it has well. Hitchcock's last film before going to Hollywood, the last time he'd work with such a limited budget.

• Cassandra M

  
  This is the best of the early Hitchcock films. The plot is absorbing, the dialogue clever and the cast great. Whether or not this was the first of the director's films to place its principal action on a moving train I cannot say, but it's a theme that would come back again… More
  This is the best of the early Hitchcock films. The plot is absorbing, the dialogue clever and the cast great. Whether or not this was the first of the director's films to place its principal action on a moving train I cannot say, but it's a theme that would come back again in his later work, most notably in "Strangers on a Train." The film gets off to a somewhat rocky start with the camera panning over an Alpine inn and a train halted mid-journey by an avalanche. I agree with the review who observes that we've become spoilt by more sophisticated special effects. A Lionel half buried in a heap of bleached wheat flower just doesn't cut it nowadays. Think also of the stick figure engulfed in the munitions factory explosion in "Saboteur." I suppose directors of that era had to do with whatever was available. But after this point the film really takes off, and one scarcely recalls the unpromising opening. Viewers always look for the chemistry or lack thereof between actors. Well, Lockwood and Redgrave definitely have it. One cannot help but enjoy seeing how the initial sparks flying between their clashing characters develop into true love by movie's end. As the two are making their way through the train trying to locate Whitty, they move from one barely plausible predicament to another. But we love it, as one witty exchange turns quickly into another. (For example, Lockwood is asked to describe the missing Whitty and launches into an extremely detailed portrait that leaves not a single button unaccounted for. Then she ends by saying, "That's all I can remember." Counters Redgrave dryly: "Well, you can't have been paying attention.") Much of the film's action occurs in the fictional country of Bandrika, which seems to be a thinly disguised stand-in for nazi-controlled Austria, so recently annexed by Hitler's Germany. As an amateur linguist, I found myself trying to make sense of the made-up "Bandrikan" spoken by the natives, but of course was unable to do so. (What could it be? A Finno-Ugric language? :) Most of the time the identity of Hitchcock's villains remains deliberately vague, except in "Notorious" and "Torn Curtain," where they are nazis and communists respectively. It works better when he leaves us guessing. As an amateur musician I loved Hitch's "macguffin," namely, the secret formula encoded in a song which the protagonists had to memorize and carry to the Foreign Office in London. (I should think, however, that a genuine secret message might translate into something more like Schoenberg's twelve-tone music than a central European folk song, but of course that would hardly work in a film. :) The early Hitchcock seemed to like shootouts, as seen also in the first version of "The Man Who Knew Too Much." But shootouts are an ineffective way to convey suspense, and this is perhaps the one thing that dims what is otherwise a masterpiece. It's too bad the director lived long enough to see this film remade in 1979. Cybil Shepherd is no Margaret Lockwood, and it's pretty unpleasant-almost embarrassing-to see her shrieking her way through each scene. Couldn't they have waited a few years until he had passed on? They ought to have let him die in peace.

• Pierluigi P

  
  Really funny and entertaining british-era Hitchcock film.

• Matthew Y

  
  Easily the most entertaining of all Hitchcock's British films The Lady Vanishes adds some well needed humor and lighthearted characters to help get us through the more talky bits. It is a technique that Hitchcock will continue to use for many of his future films. The ending… More
  Easily the most entertaining of all Hitchcock's British films The Lady Vanishes adds some well needed humor and lighthearted characters to help get us through the more talky bits. It is a technique that Hitchcock will continue to use for many of his future films. The ending shoot-out is a little lame and tacky (as well as a odd change of form for Hitchcock) but it doesn't diminish the fine script or entertaining performances from the cast. The only Hitchcock film from the 30's I would recommend watching.

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