TIME (21/Nov/1938) - The Lady Vanishes
(c) Time (21/Nov/1938)
- keywords: Alfred Hitchcock, Alma Reville, Dame May Whitty, David O. Selznick, Gaumont British Picture Corporation Limited, Margaret Lockwood, Rebecca (1940), Secret Agent (1936), The 39 Steps (1935), The Lady Vanishes (1938), Titanic
- Sloan's Alfred Hitchcock: A Filmography and Bibliography (1995) — page 357, #126
The Lady Vanishes (Gaumont British)
The Lady Vanishes exhibits Director Alfred Hitchcock, England's portly master of melodrama, at the top of his form. The ingredients of Hitchcock pictures rarely vary much. They include a beautiful English girl, a some what bewildered hero, several international spies, a code and a journey, preferably by train.
To these, in The Lady Vanishes, is added a story which will remind admirers of Alexnder Woollcott of his famed anecdote about the young lady who, visiting Paris with her mother, was sadly disconcerted one day to find that the old lady had disappeared and that nobody would admit that she had ever existed. For the mother, The Lady Vanishes substitutes a dowdy English governess (Dame May Whitty); for Paris, it substitutes an express train on which young Iris Henderson (Margaret Lockwood) is going back to England; and for bubonic plague, which was the reason in the Woollcott story for the old lady's complete blotting out, it substitutes an international intrigue, two British cricket fanciers and a mort of shootings and stranglings.
That the elements of a Hitchcock melodrama provoke an excitement utterly lacking when the same elements are combined by less skillful directors is due to Director Hitchcock's unique talent for cinematic story construction and his unparalleled diligence in employing it. Before a Hitchcock picture goes before the cameras, it has been written four times; by Hitchcock himself, by Hitchcock and a scenario writer, by Hitchcock and a dialogue writer and finally by Hitchcock and his wife, Alma Reville. Once work begins on the set, it progresses rapidly. Because Hitchcock considers it unnecessary to explain to them anything except the scene with which they are specifically concerned, his actors are often as baffled by what is going on as audiences will be later.
More popular in England than in the U.S., Hitchcock pictures like The 39 Steps, Secret Agent are often too intricately built and written to appeal to mass audiences. To connoisseurs of spy melodrama, they rate as classics, and play steady revival engagements in Manhattan and London. Hitchcock lives in a walk-up flat in London, spends his weekends gardening at his cottage in Surrey. Now 38, he has been directing English pictures for 14 years, will work in Hollywood for the first time next February when he goes there to make Titanic and Rebecca for David Selznick.
