| DVD: www.amazon.com thefilmarchive.org The Lady Vanishes is a 1938 British thriller film directed by Alfred Hitchcock and adapted by Sidney Gilliat and Frank Launder from the 1936 novel The Wheel Spins by Ethel Lina White. It stars Margaret Lockwood, Michael Redgrave, Paul Lukas and Dame May Whitty, and features Cecil Parker, Linden Travers, Naunton Wayne, Basil Radford, Mary Clare, Googie Withers, Catherine Lacey and Sally Stewart. The Lady Vanishes is Hitchcock's penultimate film made in the UK before his move to Hollywood--1939's Jamaica Inn followed it. It was the great success of The Lady Vanishes, after a slump of three films that were not hits, that made it possible for Hitchcock to negotiate a very good deal to work in the States. A remake, also entitled The Lady Vanishes, was made in 1979. In Bandrika, a fictional country in an "uncivilised" region of immediately pre-World War II Central Europe, a motley group of travellers eager to return to England is delayed by an avalanche that has blocked the railway tracks. At night, a folk singer plays a tune al fresco that catches the attention of Miss Froy (May Whitty), an elderly lady who has worked some years abroad as a governess. The folk singer is suddenly silenced--apparently murdered. Among the train's passengers are Gilbert (Michael Redgrave), a young musicologist who has been studying the folk songs of the region, Iris (Margaret Lockwood), a young woman of independent means who has spent a holiday with some ... |
