The (Older) Lady Vanishes
The Lady Vanishes is a 1938 zeitgeist film wherein a male hero doesn’t rescue a damsel in distress so much as allies with her. Archetypal story lines are extant: initial annoyance, each of the other (though he is absolutely fascinated by her immediately), a tweed-cloak-and-dagger plot to draw them thematically and physically closer. There’s a sparky disagreement – Where is Miss Froy? or is there a Miss Froy?
Later, they’ll share a moral-code-defying many-positioned ménage à trois that’s cleverly “magical” (You’ll see!) disguised as a fight. (Hitchcock will use a version of this with a kissing scene in Notorious.) After this basic training, love will come to fruition, notwithstanding one ass-slapping and one lovingly pretended punch-to-the-jaw for Iris, to give Michael Redgrave’s Gilbert Redman. He plays a clarinet, is writing a book on Brandikan folk tunes, and wears a lot of hair product, and is woefully short of testosterone. His looks and skills go for naught, however; The Lady Vanishes is solidly Margaret Lockwood’s Iris Henderson’s film.
While the everlasting success of The Lady Vanishes is generally assigned to director Alfred Hitchcock, and while his contribution is not to be diminished an iota, the senior attribution – as in most films not Star Wars nor Marvel should go, as always, to the writers, here Sidney Gilliat and Frank Launder. They were prolific screenwriters - 40-plus films, but at SpyGuysLifestyles.com we’re interested in espionage, and even here Gilliat and Launder’s contributions were outstanding – The Lady Vanishes, Night Train to Munich and I See a Dark Stranger. In SGL’s Top 100 Essential Espionage Films, I See a Dark Stranger falls just outside the top 100, while Night Train to Munich is #51, and The Lady Vanishes is at #12, as of this date.
For me, a singular contribution of Gilliat and Launder, and handled with grace, charm, and remarkable prescience by Hitchcock, was the creation of the supporting characters Charters and Caldicott, and unless someone finds an earlier reference, motion pictures’ first positively represented gay couple, though later, not surprisingly they will be sexually reassigned as straights, not to tempt a Brontosaurian moral code, and to continue to exist on-screen the egregiously British public. Charters and Caldicott's scenes in The Lady Vanishes are startling for 1938. 16-years later, in ’54, the British government will force their mathematical and computer genius, Alan Turning to choose suicide or self-administered chemically castration. 27-years later, in ‘65 a United Kingdom opinion poll would find that 93% of its respondents believed homosexuality was a form of illness that could be cured by medical treatment. 93%. You could say without contradiction that Charters and Caldicott’s contributions to The Lady Vanishes are important, but I disagree; by my observation, their contributions are inestimable; without C&C's humor and style and bravery, The Lady Vanishes from the pantheon of classic British films.
As a side note here, the brilliant critic/writer/film scholar Bruce Eder disagrees with me. In his commentary to The Lady Vanishes Mr. Eder suggests that Charters and Caldicott were not gay but whose actions were representative of typical schoolboys. Yikes. It’s been my personal experience that shying away from an attractive, sexually available maid who suggestively and repeatedly comes into your room while you’re in bed and half-dressed is hardly a typical schoolboy response, much less typical. I highly recommend Mr. Eder’s nearly perfect commentary to this nearly perfect film.
On the website, Rotten Tomatoes - collected on the Tomatometer and notwithstanding admittedly squishy algorithms, The Lady Vanishes received a 98% score from 41 “critics” and an 88% approval from “audience.”
The British Film Institute, in 1999, asked a thousand people to come-up with the 100 greatest British films of the 20th century. Only three 1930’s films made the list – so, arithmetically, the ‘30’s weren’t the shining decade for British films, but two of the three were espionage films: The Lady Vanishes at #35 and The 39 Steps at #4. (Yes, 2-out-of-3 are Hitchcock’s.)
TLV is a “train thriller,” (“Where is the older lady with whom I had tea?”) and a “who-done-it” (The Surgeon in the Sleeper Car with the Nun.), topped-off with some romance-y stuff. What’s often overlooked is that The Lady Vanishes is also a seminal anti-war story showing demonstrably that passivity in the face of evil doesn’t work, but mostly it’s great fun about the disappearance of a British spy carrying a secret code being pursued by a heroine, who, if she were cast in a present-day remake wouldn’t have to change a scintilla.
All other numerous qualities aside, for me The Lady Varnishes’ strength lies in its representation of how women can carry a film being smart, beautiful, strong, kind, and persistent without demonizing the penis.
The cast of Lady Vanishes, 1938
left to right: Naunton Wayne (seated), Margaret Lockwood, May Whitty, Michael Redgrave, Basil Radford (seated), and Cecil Parker.
Movie trailer for The Lady Vanishes (1938) directed by Alfred Hitchcock.
