Europe on the Brink of War
Europe on the Brink of War
Alfred Hitchcock’s The Lady Vanishes
By Charlie Bertsch
Alfred Hitchcock’s 1938 film The Lady Vanishes plays havoc with convention.
At first, it seems to be the kind of light-hearted tale popular with audiences during the Great Depression, permitting them to experience vicariously the mobility available to those who could afford to travel abroad.
An avalanche has forced the passengers on a train to seek refuge in a small hotel, which is ill-equipped to handle so many customers.
We learn the characters are in Bandrika, a fictional Alpine country in Central Europe.
The opening scenes are played for laughs, emphasising the cultural misunderstandings that arise when strangers from different lands are forced to cope with limited resources.
Soon, the elements of a screwball comedy come into focus as free-spirited society girl Iris Henderson (Margaret Lockwood) meets her mismatch, the equally insouciant ethnomusicologist Gilbert Redmann (Michael Redgrave).
But the milieu provides for other humorous subplots, such as the consternation of Caldicott (Naunton Wayne) and Charters (Basil Radford), two well-heeled English travelling companions desperate to make it home for the end of an important cricket test match.
We are introduced to Miss Froy (May Witty), a jovial elderly woman who has just ended a long stint as a governess to a local dignitary.
Because Alfred Hitchcock was already known as a specialist in thrillers in the 1930s, some people who saw the film during its initial theatrical run would have expected the story to take a dramatic turn.
Even with that knowledge, however, the hotel scenes in the film manage to deceive. They go on too long to feel like mere stage-setting.
When we see a local musician strangled while performing in the street, the narrative seems poised to make an abrupt shift. Yet the lingering memory of the preceding scenes in the hotel makes it hard to take the threat seriously.
Even after Iris is hit on the head by a brick pushed off a balcony overlooking the train station the following day, we don’t get the sense that it matters much for the characters we have come to know.
Miss Froy helps Iris compose herself after the accident, diverting our attention from the malice that lurks on the story’s margin.
Only after Froy seemingly disappears into thin air on the train does it become apparent that Iris and her fellow passengers will have to contend with problems that cannot be dispersed with laughter.
Now, we become aware of a conspiracy.
Iris searches for the missing Miss Froy, only to be told repeatedly that her mind is playing tricks on her.
The impact of these scenes is similar to the ones that the 1944 film Gaslight turned into a verb.
Because we have seen Miss Froy ourselves, we know that Iris is being deliberately deceived. On the train, however, where the characters only have partial knowledge of events, this subterfuge is difficult to prove.
Even Gilbert, who has taken a fancy to Iris, isn’t sure whether her panic deserves to be taken seriously.
But Iris does not respond well to patriarchal condescension.
Her refusal to write off her memories of Miss Froy as a hallucination turns her into a Cassandra figure. Only Iris can persuade her sceptics before it is too late.
Given The Lady Vanishes’ context, it is hard not to perceive the narrative as a warning.
Although the film’s audience might have been tempted to reduce political conflicts on the Continent to local colour, their importance for the English-speaking world was too big to ignore.
That explains why Hitchcock, alarmed by the head-in-the-sand logic of appeasement, was keen to make the opening scenes in the hotel so entertaining.
If the humour there only seemed like a precursor to inevitable horror, we would not gain insight into the dangerous mindset afflicting so many people in the free world during the 1930s.
In other words, The Lady Vanishes wants us to comprehend the lure of escapism to combat it.
Both boldly and furtively, in large ways and small, Hitchcock’s film keeps pushing the envelope.
From a contemporary point of view, it seems incredible that he managed to sneak The Lady Vanishes past the Board of Censors when much tamer fare ran afoul of its standards.
But that is because we watch the film with eyes that know what we are looking for: a hand placed caressingly on someone else’s hip, the layered indirection a same-sex couple uses to deceive others – and maybe themselves – about the nature of their bond.
During the 1930s, by contrast, few in the audience had the training to peer beneath the surface.
By showing us how what first seems extraneous to the plot might actually be a plot, The Lady Vanishes alerts us to pay attention to details the way a detective might, even before we have a clear sense of their potential significance.
Calidcott and Charters do not appear in the novel on which the screenplay is loosely based, Ethel Lina White’s 1936 mystery The Wheel Spins.
Although some of their narrative function is assumed by characters who didn’t make it into the film, they add something new.
Hitchcock turns these homosexually coded companions into stand-ins for the film’s audience.
At the beginning of the film, they are consumed by myopia.
Calidcott and Charters are so fixated on the cricket test match they are worried about missing that they lie to Iris about whether they have seen Miss Froy or not, fearing that acknowledging the woman’s existence will delay their passage.
But they eventually realise the error of their ways and enthusiastically take up arms to battle the foreign agents responsible for Froy’s abduction.
The message is clear.
We cannot afford to prioritise the personal over the political.
A scene early in the film makes this point brilliantly.
Forced to share the maid’s room in the hotel attic, Caldicott and Charters are revealed to be a true couple, sufficiently comfortable with each other to navigate the tight space with no discomfort.
Interspersed with the scenes depicting the initial conflict between Iris and Gilbert comes a shot of two hands holding up a newspaper, the American International Herald Tribune.
We hear Caldicott’s voice complaining that the only sports news he can find in its pages concerns baseball.
But we can also see if we are paying close attention, that the above-the-fold content of the front page features stories on a victory by Franco’s forces in the Spanish Civil War and by the Chinese in Tsingtao, as they were fighting the Japanese invaders.
War is all around us. All we have to do is look.
This point is illustrated when the newspaper suddenly drops.
We realise that the left hand belongs to the moustachioed Charters and the right one to the clean-shaven, shirtless Caldicott.
When Charters gets out of bed, we realise he is wearing only a pyjama top, suggesting that Caldicott had the bottoms on.
Although the film has provided a reason for them having to share a bed, Hitchcock is nevertheless making their status as a couple very clear by 1930s standards.
The men‘s English parochial interests are at odds with the impetus to be mindful of global affairs, but their bond with each other is at odds with those interests as well.
Back home, their relationship is illegal. It can only be revealed indirectly, on the margins.
You have to know where to look, just as you do when trying to make sense of foreign policy.
The most compelling kind of allegory shies away from specificity.
Only by making a range of responses valid can it win the investment of strong-willed individuals who refuse to follow a script word for word.
Because The Lady Vanishes features a fictional country and only invokes the real news of the day in that one shot of the newspaper, it permits us to comprehend its underlying message without the friction of actually existing ideologies to complicate our response.
Nevertheless, the film is a call to arms, as the shoot-out in the train car demonstrates beyond a shadow of a doubt.
That’s what makes The Lady Vanishes pertinent today, at a time when the free world is regularly distracted by laughing at matters of deadly seriousness.
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Screenshot courtesy of Retro Central. Published under a Creative Commons license.