The Lady Vanishes (1938)

One of my favorite movies is Night Train to Munich (1940) a WWII espionage film with a very dry sense of humor, I've probably seen it dozens of times, yet it wasn't until this last week that I saw it's kind of prequel. The characters of Charters and Caldicott played by Naunton Wayne and Basil Radford respectively, made their film debut in Alfred Hitchcock's The Lady Vanishes in 1938, and would show up in an additional three films, by various directors played by the same two performers. Wayne and Basil are so good together that they would be teamed up as other characters in an additional eight movies, and the Caldicott and Charters characters would be resurrected by other actors multiple times including in the short lived BBC series Charters and Caldicott in 1985. The characters are two cricket obsessed upper class Brits, often depicted as delightfully aloof from weighty matters going on around them. They are fun to watch and I was looking forward to seeing them again.

Caldicott and Charters are not quite as funny in The Lady Vanishes as they are in Night Train, though they have their moments. Margret Lockwood who would be the female lead in Night Train is also the female lead here, and much of the movie of course takes place on a passenger train traveling through central Europe in the late 1930's. Despite these similarities I was ultimately disappointed with Lady, which I have to regard as one of Hitchcock's more blaw and least distinctively Hitchcokian films. The plot is like a cross between Murder on the Orient Express and So Long at the Fair, and is principally built around a case of gaslighting. Where Night Train was very packed and lively, Lady plays rather slow and relatively little really happens in it. Not even the presence of Michael Redgrave and May Whittey, who I'm usually big fans of could save this film for me. The movie is not horrible, but I think a good re-write could have made it more engaging. **