THE LADY VANSHES screens Friday
June 28th at 5:15 pm and Saturday June 29th at 9:45 pm at the
Cleveland Cinematheque.]
Review by Charles Cassady, Jr.
THE LADY VANISHES...You mean
they've done the movie about Ariel Castro and Seymour Avenue
already!? Rimshot! No, it's one of the early classics of Alfred
Hitchcock's UK film career. This was before Hollywood wooed the
British-born director to become the domestic film industry's "Master
of Suspense." Whom they have, of course, latterly trashed in a
couple of biopics as a creepy sort and blonde- and
serial-killer-obsessed weirdo. I do wonder if Hitchcock, if he'd been
given a look ahead at that, might just have decided to stay in
England after all...
Anyway, I wouldn't say THE LADY
VANISHES has aged as gracefully as some of Hitchcock's other
vintage classics, but you owe it to yourself to check it out on the
big screen, as so many audiences of yesteryear were swept up in the
expert blend of comedy and suspense.
The setting is a mythical European
country. An avalanche temporarily strands an international group of
travelers at an inn. Youthful Iris (Margaret Lockwood), from England,
is reluctantly engaged to be married to some dull guy and is taking a
train trip as one last adventure with her girlfriends before her life
settles down to unbearably boring routine (are you gay people still
sure you want that right? Not too late to back out...) . Iris
befriends an elegant old lady, Mrs. Froy (May Witty), who describes
herself as a retired governess. Just before the train finally leaves,
Iris is struck on the head by a falling flower-box (which may have
been targeting Mrs. Froy) and gets on the train disoriented with the
older woman. When Iris wakes up she finds Mrs. Froy missing - and all
other passengers and staff deny Mrs. Froy was ever there.
By modern digital-editing/CGI blizzard
standards, the narrative is a bit of snoozer, initially, at least for
the first half-hour, as Hitchcock calmly introduces the assorted
colorful characters in the hotel-bound setting. It's indeed a product
of an olden-days era which shows in the dialogue and pacing (a number
of jokes revolve around fanatical followers of the sport of cricket -
guess you had to be there). But then old Mrs. Froy evaporates into
thin air, and the real suspense kicks in and never lets up. Those
same silly train passengers from beforehand begin to seem more
sinister and dangerous in their denials and blithe dismissals of the
frantic Iris. Only a fun-loving musician and noncomformist named
Gilbert (the legendary Michael Redgrave) takes Iris' story seriously
and tries to help solve the mystery.
Though a backdrop of espionage, armed
stormtroopers and European political crisis suggests some kind of a
Nazi vibe, the thriller actually hearkens to an old-fashioned form of
story, the "Graustarkian romance" - tales of intrigue and
swashbuckling set in make-believe little countries tucked away
somewhere in Europe. The whole PRINCESS DIARIES movie-and-book
franchise springs from the same well, thought the genre classic is,
of course, the oft-filmed novel The Prisoner of Zenda. Which
just goes to demonstrate, again, that this was very much a product of
its time, with an old-school movie heroine who faints a lot and needs
a man to bail her out of trouble and do the serious fighting (and
most of the thinking). Yes, thank you feminists, for freeing us from
that, and giving us the delightful cultural climate we now enjoy
today (caution: previous sentence contains sarcasm).
Put it this way, they'll still be
talking about THE LADY VANISHES in reverent tones five decades
from now. Whilst the comic-book blockbuster or teen-bait monster
romance getting all the kitsch magazine covers/website banners this
week will only be a trivia question. Which is as it should be. (3 1/4
out of 4 stars)
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