Rent The Lady Vanishes (1938)

Screwball Thriller. - The Lady Vanishes review by Steve

It's 1938 and war in Europe is inevitable.  A diverse and disinterested assembly of British dilettantes, obsessives and eccentrics travelling by train through the Balkans, puts aside denial and appeasement and finally realise they must fight or die. This is a thriller from Alfred Hitchcock, but the premise is from the headlines.

In his film debut, Michael Redgrave plays a musicologist researching middle European folk music and becomes antagonistically entangled with Margaret Lockwood's pleasure-seeking it-girl on one last fling before marriage, and a dotty dowager/British agent who mysteriously goes missing.

Only Lockwood and Redgrave are willing to get involved, while they backchat and fall in love. This is a classic of Hitchcock's British years, but plenty of credit is due to Frank Launder and Sidney Gilliat who developed the project. And they contribute a wonderful screwball script.

It's fast paced and suspenseful (naturally) with a brilliant cast of support characters, including the immortal cricket obsessed English everymen, Charters and Caldicott (Basil Radford and Naunton Wayne).  It's just so gloriously entertaining and the ultimate train thriller. One of the greatest UK films of the '30s.

Hitchcock Classic before he left for Hollywood - The Lady Vanishes review by AB

Proving that nobody does it like Hitchcock, this movie is a shining example of mystery and suspense without the need for gratuitous violence or other degeneracy so loved by the contemporary Hollywood scene. Those weaned on Tarantino will find it too tame - but lovers of such writers as Agatha Christie or Ngaio Marsh will have a lot of fun.

Tea and Disdain - The Lady Vanishes review by CH

A point rarely made was put well by Manny Farber some eight decades ago: “script writing has been rare that could make the whole equal to its good parts, as were Alice Adams, Wuthering Heights and The Lady Vanishes”.

Some say that the opening section of Hitchcock's 1938 film, which finds a number of people snowbound in a mid-European hotel, is a different film from its famed railway carriage sequence; in fact, it needs this to set in motion the relationship between those involved – just as there is an equally engaging and comic a time at the start of Rear Window before apparent murder takes place. The Lady Vanishes, too, has comic brio throughout which is not simply the cricket-vexed pair Basil Radford and Naunton Wayne but the banter between folksong specialist Michael Redgrave and a woman who is on her way back to marry into grand circles at St. George's, Hanover Square.

The title is a summary of the plot, the railway making the disappearance all the more puzzling while one and all, such as the creepily elegant doctor (Paul Luckas) amd the dining-car attendants assure Margaret Lockwood that she is suffering from delusion, as people were to inform wheelchair-bound James Stewart as he looked across that New York tenement block.

And to think that all this European voyage was filmed at Islington. Hitchcock's use of model sets and miniature engines carries one into a Europe on the brink of war, and, as Farber suggests, much of this is buttressed by the way in which Sidney Gilliat and Frank Launder's script has these couples' lives running in parallel (not least the fusty lawyer, Cecil Parker, who is having an affair with the ever-spirited Linden Travers).

Here is high entertainment, as is so much of Hitchcock's English period. If the transatlantic Rear Window and Shadow of a Doubt have a claim to be his best work, The Lady Vanishes is not toiling along a branch line.