Mainly About Manhattan (BBC Radio, 19/Jan/1939)
As part of the programme, presenter Alistair Cooke reviewed The Lady Vanishes (1938).
Broadcast Details
- broadcast on BBC Radio (National Programme Daventry)[1]
- date: 19/Jan/1939 at 10:20pm
- length: approx 15 minutes
- keywords: Alfred Hitchcock, The Lady Vanishes (1938)
Transcript
In Manhattan the new Hitchcock movie, The Lady Vanishes, has been voted by the critics as the best directed movie of 1938. I have never known an audience in a movie theatre anywhere applaud so whole-heartedly together as the Broadway audiences are applauding The Lady Vanishes. There is just one moment, however, in that film where a great laugh rises from the American audience, which positively does not happen in England. When the train is switched which the Central European crook is chasing along the road by the side of the track, a great shout goes up from the startled audience. The two cars come along the road, and half the audience is smitten with astonishment, and cries, "Ho! Buicks!" You know that Americans will often accept ridiculous plots in stories provided the material details are precise. They had been thinking — the poor fools — for an hour that The Lady Vanishes was taking place in our own day, until the sudden vision of those two ancient Buicks. The idea of extremely smooth and well-groomed European spies of 1939 using such a car is almost, for the Americans, the biggest laugh in the picture.[2]
Credits
- Alistair Cooke — presenter
Notes & References
- ↑ Project Genome: BBC Radio Times Archive
- ↑ Reproduced in Alistair Cooke at the Movies, edited by Geoff Brown (ISBN 9780141036069).
