Movies - The Lady Vanishes

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	Movies - The Lady Vanishes

The Lady Vanishes is a 1938 film directed by Alfred Hitchcock, adapted by Sidney Gilliat and Frank Launder from the novel The Wheel Spins by Ethel Lina White.

In an "uncivilized" Alpine region of pre-World War II Europe, a motley group of tourists eager to get back to England is delayed by an avalanche blocking the railway tracks. Among the passengers are Gilbert (Michael Redgrave), a young musicologist who has been studying the folk songs of the region; Iris (Margaret Lockwood), a young woman of independent means who has spent a holiday with some friends but now has to travel home alone to be married; and Miss Froy (Dame May Whitty), an elderly lady who is returning to England after some years abroad as a governess.

When the train resumes its journey, Iris and Miss Froy strike up a conversation, while the remaining passengers in the compartment appear not to understand a word of English. Iris lapses into unconsciousness (the result of an earlier encounter with a falling flowerpot meant for Miss Froy). When she reawakens, the governess has vanished into thin air. Iris voices her concern about her disappearance, but she is shocked to learn that the other passengers claim Miss Froy never existed. Even the other English travellers deny ever seeing her, for their own reasons.

Also in the cast were Paul Lukas, Cecil Parker, Linden Travers, Naunton Wayne, Basil Radford, Mary Clare, Googie Withers, Catherine Lacey, and Sally Stewart.

Everyone, including a foreign doctor, declares that she must be hallucinating due to her accident. Unconvinced, Iris starts to investigate, joined only by a skeptical Gilbert, with whom she eventually falls in love.

The couple find out that Miss Froy is being held prisoner in a sealed-off compartment supposedly occupied by a seriously ill patient on his way to an operation. They manage to free Miss Froy, but the train is diverted to a side track, where a shootout ensues. Miss Froy intimates to Gilbert and Iris that she is in fact a British spy assigned to carry some vital information (the famous Hitchcock MacGuffin) to the Foreign Office in London; after entrusting her message, encoded in a folk song, to Gilbert, she flees under cover of the shootout.

After managing to restart the train and make their own escape from the villains, Gilbert and Iris return to London with the message. At the Foreign Office, Gilbert, driven to joyful distraction - Iris has accepted his proposal - discovers that he can't recall the tune. Fortunately, Miss Froy has also made good her escape, and was able to complete her task herself.

It must be noted that the plot of Hitchcock's film differs considerably from White's novel. In The Wheel Spins, Miss Froy really is an innocent old lady looking forward to seeing her octogenarian parents and witnesses a murder shortly before boarding the train. In White's novel, the wheel keeps spinning: The train never stops, and there is no final shootout.

It has often been stated that the action of the movie is set in Nazi-controlled Austria immediately before the outbreak of the Second World War, although the film itself gives no such specific information about the setting.

Two of the supporting characters, the hilariously singleminded cricket fans Caldicott and Charters (played by Naunton Wayne and Basil Radford), proved so popular with audiences that they starred in a movie of their own, Crook's Tour (1939), and appeared in two more Gilliat-and-Launder-scripted movies, Night Train to Munich
(1940) (also starring Margaret Lockwood) and Millions Like Us (1943). They were resurrected again for a BBC television series, Charters & Caldicott, in 1985, starring Michael Aldridge as Caldicott and Robin Bailey as Charters.

Remake

The Lady Vanishes was remade in 1979. It was directed by Anthony Page and adapted by George Axelrod. It stars Elliott Gould as Robert (Gilbert), Cybill Shepherd as Amanda (Iris), Angela Lansbury as Miss Froy, Herbert Lom, Arthur Lowe and Ian Carmichael.

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