Where’s Miss Froy?

Back to Britannia…

In 1938 Alfred Hitchcock was really hitting his stride as a filmmaker, and The Lady Vanishes is a great example of his unique talent for presentation coming together. It was his next-to-last British film before moving to America and the next stage of his career.

The movie starts in Bandrika, a fictional European country that looks like a cross between Switzerland and Germany, where a group of bored passengers learn their train is delayed due to an avalanche, so they’re going to have to stay the night in the local hotel. Because of the unexpected inconvenience, the place is packed to the gills, and horror of horrors, the dining room runs out of food. There’s plenty of beer, though, so that’s good.

One young woman, Iris (Margaret Lockwood) gets annoyed because she’s trying to sleep and the people upstairs are particularly loud and stampy. She doesn’t know and doesn’t care that the culprit, a cocky young fellow named Gilbert (Michael Redgrave) is playing his clarinet while some local people he’s invited to his room dance local folk dances. She’s trying to sleep before the big train trip, after all.

From the beginning these two have a contentious relationship. Iris has the manager kick Gilbert out of his room, and to her great annoyance, Gilbert walks into Iris’s room and makes himself at home, and he’s so committed to this idea that he goes into the bathroom and acts like he’s going to take a shower. The only way he’ll leave is if Iris phones the manager and gets his room back. Iris is still angry but finally relents.

(On a side note, who the heck leaves their hotel room unlocked, especially at night? The movie being set in 1938 doesn’t matter. An unlocked room door in a crowded hotel is just asking for trouble, but I digress.)

Everyone is thankful when the trains are finally running again, and at the station the next day Iris is helping a nice old lady named Miss Froy (Dame May Whitty) find her glasses and gets hit on the head by a planter falling from above. Miss Froy ends up taking charge of Iris when the train gets going because Iris, despite saying she’s OK, faints as soon as the train starts moving.

After a trip to the dining car for some of Miss Froy’s particular brand of Spanish tea, Iris falls asleep in their compartment, and when she wakes up, Miss Froy’s not only gone, but no one else in the compartment remembers her.

Horrified, Iris begins to frantically search the train for Miss Froy, only no one else remembers her, either, not even a pair of cricket fans Miss Froy asked for sugar in the dining car. The only real sympathetic ears she finds are Dr. Egon Hartz (Paul Lukas) and, funnily enough, Gilbert, who’s also on the train. Iris is annoyed again, but she forgets about that pretty quickly because Gilbert turns out to be a resourceful fellow and an ethnomusicologist. That becomes important later.

It’s amazing what kinds of things go on during train trips, at least in Hitchcock movies, but I’m not going to spoil anything. Suffice it to say, there’s a gunfight in the middle of the forest, there are magic tricks, and a nun wearing high heels, although not in that order. That might sound like something out of a David Lynch movie, but things get really good really quick.

The Lady Vanishes is a movie a lot of people wax lyrical about, and it’s no wonder, because this is one of the first movies in which the Alfred Hitchcock we know and love seems fully formed. The heroine is recovering from a blow to the head, which means she’s never sure of what she sees and neither are we. The film is very witty and full of humor, and we see a lot of familiar Hitchcock motifs, such as doubles and double-crossing. Two cricket fans. Two women in oatmeal tweed. A duplicitous character pretending to be what he’s not. There’s a cameo by Hitchcock. And it takes place on a train, a setting Hitchcock was more than familiar with.

It’s also interesting that the movie dances around the imminent Second World War while also engaging in timely drama. That’s why the film takes place in a fictional European country so no real countries get offended, there are hostile individuals, there are spies, and there are creepy guys in uniform. The film never uses the word, “Nazi,” but it might as well have. The dancing Hitch did here is truly impressive.

On the other hand, though, it’s not my favorite Hitchcock movie, although it’s not completely terrible. It’s fun watching Iris and Gilbert verbally bat each other around. He seems to enjoy her getting annoyed and she takes the bait every time. Miss Froy is a wonderful, briskly nurturing old-school Englishwoman, and to be honest, it’s tough for Dame May Whitty to not be wonderful.

The problem is that the movie takes a long time to get going, spending about twenty minutes of its hour-and-thirty-five minute run time goofing around at the hotel before anyone even gets on the train. It all kind of drags, although there are a lot of antics, such as the two cricket buffs having to share the maid’s quarters with the maid, who keeps walking in and out, grabbing clothes, and winking at them as they watch with their jaws on the floor. That’s how innocent these two guys are. It also gives us a lot of time to establish Iris and Gilbert’s initial relationship. Iris is kind of a diva, to be honest, and she’s got the hotel concierge wrapped around her little finger.

A movie like The Lady Vanishes needs momentum, and unfortunately we don’t get that when it’s needed most, although the sum total is pretty fun. To be sure, Hitch learned a lot in the years since and we all know where that’s gone.

For more of the Rule Britannia Blogathon, please visit Terence at A Shroud of Thoughts. Thanks for hosting this, Terence–it was fun! Thanks for reading, all, and I hope to see you tomorrow for my Everything Is Copy Blogathon post…

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