A part of this view­ing list: Cri­te­rion Col­lec­tion Spine #3: Alfred Hitchcock’s The Lady Vanishes.

I’d not heard of this Hitch­cock film, which he made while he was still based in Britain, basi­cally to fin­ish out a con­tract with a film com­pany as far as I can tell. The Cri­te­rion Col­lec­tion bills it as a roman­tic comedy/​thriller, which aren’t my favorite gen­res, but I still ended up enjoy­ing this movie, mainly for the British­ness of the humor, if not for the thriller aspects or the romance.

This is another film that was released on the cusp of World War II and this one is full of not-​so sub­tle polit­i­cal com­men­tary on British inter­na­tional rela­tions. Sev­eral times British politi­cians are called brain­less and lots of comic effect is derived from two men who are con­stantly con­cerned with “the sit­u­a­tion in Eng­land” by which they mean a cricket match, a bar­ris­ter is also shot in the back — which seems to be the writer’s and director’s way of pun­ish­ing him for being a cow­ard. I prob­a­bly missed other obvi­ous insin­u­a­tions that weren’t obvi­ous to me because I’m 67 years out of con­text and not British. All of this seems a bit out of place by the end of the movie, when we dis­cover that there is a secret mes­sage that needs deliv­er­ing to the For­eign Office.

There are plenty of plot twists to keep a viewer inter­ested and we find out who the vil­lain is before the heros do. This sim­ple twist struck me as a mas­ter­ful use of plot device to reju­ve­nate the momen­tum of a film that basi­cally con­sists of run­ning from one end of a train to the other again and again. But as I said before, the humor kept me going. The two men who only care about the cricket match are calm and col­lected under fire. One of them gets shot in the hand and pre­tends it is noth­ing but merely asks to bor­row his buddy’s hand­ker­chief. His buddy keeps the straight-​man act going by say­ing “think noth­ing of it.” The romance is pretty under­scored com­pared to what you’re going to see in con­tem­po­rary romance sto­ries, the sud­den face-​sucking at the end caught me a bit by surprise.

I get the feel­ing that this film has lost some­thing with age. I bet it was quite stronger and dan­ger­ous in its own time. Hitchcock’s cameo comes exactly an hour and a half into the film in the hus­tle and bus­tle of Vic­to­ria Sta­tion. The on-​train con­spir­acy strains credulity in its appar­ent com­plete­ness and the lengths the vil­lains go to in order to dis­pose of the van­ished lady are also a bit out there. Despite the skill which Michael Wilm­ing­ton claims Hitch­cock has used to make this a suc­cess­ful roman­tic comedy/​thriller I still feel like they are two gen­res that don’t taste great together. But then, I’m already slightly prej­u­diced against them.

• Michael Wilmington’s Cri­te­rion Essay
• Wikipedia entry
• The Cri­te­rion Contraption’s review.