The Times (10/Oct/1938) - New films in London: The Lady Vanishes
(c) The Times (10/Oct/1938)
- keywords: Alfred Hitchcock, The Lady Vanishes (1938)
NEW FILMS IN LONDON EMPIRE
The Lady Vanishes. — Mr. Alfred Hitchcock waves his directorial wand and the lady vanishes — suddenly and inexplicably. One minute she is sitting there in the corner of a compartment in a Continental express, plump and benign, a middle-aged English governess in sensible tweeds; the next she has gone, vanished into thin air, and the passengers on the train only shrug their shoulders in their expressive Continental way and swear that she was never there. In retrospect, perhaps, we may discover a flaw or two in Mr. Hitchcock's magic, but not at the time; his touch has never been surer nor his power to hold our attention more complete. He, almost alone among English directors, has an unmistakable style. He loves all that is sinister and bizarre — murder, espionage, and crime — and as a teller of all such stories he has no equal in the cinema. He understands the camera's unique powers of observation, its ability to perceive those tiny, unobtrusive clues which can mean so much, and these details fascinate him. A name scrawled on a pane of glass, a nun wearing high-heeled shoes, the wrapping from a packet of tea — these are the things upon which his plot hinges. Never for a moment does the tension of this film relax: it is all baffling, absorbing, and extraordinarily exciting, and a distinguished cast too large for individual mention most ably supports him in all these strange adventures. But Mr. Hitchcock is also a humorist, a student, it would seem, of Mr. P. G. Wodehouse, for the two Englishmen who move through his story with such imperturbable austerity and with such an acute sense of good form, have the blood of Bertram Wooster in their veins. The bullets may fly, but they think only of the Test wicket at Manchester. "Gad, Sir," we can almost hear them mutter, "Mr. Hitchcock is right. We must shoot down these foreign blighters before Hammond gets out."
