the singing spy
by Douglas Messerli
Sidney Gilliat and Frank Launder
(screenplay), Alma Reville (story continuity), Alfred Hitchcock (director) The Lady Vanishes / 1938
As critics have long commented,
music plays a large role in Hitchcock’s films. Not only are his major works
highly dependent on their musical scores (it is hard to imagine Vertigo or even North by Northwest without Bernard Herrmann’s scores), and some of
his films, most notably the remake of The
Man Who Knew Too Much incorporates music quite thoroughly into its plot.
Interestingly enough, Hitchcock’s entertaining film of 1938, The Lady Vanishes, has close story-
connections with both North by Northwest and
The Man Who Knew Too Much.
Just to remind readers, I’ll briefly recount the plot, which begins in a
small hotel in the implausible country of Bandrika, “one of Europe’s few
undiscovered corners,” where an avalanche has just closed off all the major
roads, forcing several international tourists to seek refuge in the small,
overcrowded Gasthof Petrus Inn. Among these are a beautiful English woman, Iris
Henderson (Margaret Lockwood), who, obviously quite wealthy, has experienced
everything:
I’ve no regrets. I’ve
been everywhere and done everything. I’ve
eaten caviar at
Cannes, sausage rolls at the dogs. I’ve played
baccarat at Biarritz
and darts with the rural dean. What is there
left for me but
marriage?
She is on her way back to England to marry a man she describes as “a
blue-blooded check chaser,” whom she does not love.
Also attempting to get a room are two wonderfully comic quintessential
English cricket-lovers, Charters and Caldicott (Basil Radford and Naunton
Wayne) who seem to travel about the world to watch the game, now desperate to
return to see the last days of a test match in Manchester. With droll results,
the two are forced to share a bed in the maid’s room. Upon their protests, the
manager mutters:
Well don’t get
excited. I’ll remove the maid out.
A sleazy lawyer, Mr. Todhunter (Cecil Parker), and his mistress, “Mrs.
Todhunter,” are equally proffered unpreferable quarters. A traveling
musicologist, Gilbert (Michael Redgrave), plays clarinet to dancing peasants in
his room, awakening Iris and preventing another guest, Miss Froy (Dame May
Whitty) from listening to the beautiful ballad sung by a singer beneath her
window. Iris, complaining “someone upstairs is playing musical chairs with an
elephant,” bribes the hotel manager to get Gilbert removed from his room;
Gilbert reciprocates by entering Iris’s room. And Mrs. Froy hums the tune she
has finally heard, while the singer inexplicably is murdered.
Most of the rest of the film takes place aboard a train wherein these
same figures speed their way, presumably, toward Britain, Miss Froy ministering
to the young Iris, who once aboard, has passed out, suggests a remedy of tea.
Froy and Iris head to the dining car, encountering the Todhunter couple along
the way, and sitting near the two ardent gay cricket devotees. As the two women
attempt to further introduce themselves to one another the train whistle screeches,
and, unable to be heard, Froy traces her name across the window pane.
They return to their car, where Iris drifts back into sleep as Miss Froy
works her acrostic in the Neddlewoman.
When Iris awakens, the elderly lady is gone, and her fellow compartment
travelers claim no knowledge of such a personage. Meeting up again with
Gilbert, Iris explains her quandary, and the two together begin a long search
for the now-vanished woman, what Hitchcock might describe as the McGuffin of
the work.
For various reasons—fear of their illicit affair being discovered,
determination to rush forward to their cricket game, and more nefarious and
mysterious purposes—no one but Iris seems to have seen the woman dressed in
“oatmeal tweed.” Another woman, dressed similar to Froy shows up and a renowned
doctor, Hartz (Paul Lukas) traveling on the train, suggests Iris, having had a
brief concussion, has imagined the whole thing.
The couple is attacked and, when they finally really realize that Miss Froy lies beneath the heavily bandaged patient of Dr. Hartz, attended by a nun—who the couple observes, is wearing high heels—the seekers are threatened by poison, while Hartz admits his plot. But the nurse refuses to kill them, and the two are spared only to observe, soon after, the train’s coming to stop near the country’s border. Realizing that Froy will soon be taken away, they free the bound patient while bandaging up the nun, who is taken off in Froy’s place, the train continuing on its way. Yet again the train slows, a soldier demanding they all accompany him to the British ambassadors’, Iris and Gilbert realize now perceiving that all their lives are in danger. They attempt to warn the others, who, much like some Britons on the eve of World War II, refuse to believe in the dangers—until the shooting begins, when, at least, the cricket enthusiasts are drawn into the battle.
Froy, meanwhile, takes Iris and Gilbert momentarily away from the fray
to reveal that she is actually a British agent who has been given a secret
message to pass on to government superiors. The message, in the form of the
song she has heard in the inn, is sung to the musicologist whom she demands he
remember it, before rushing out the other side of the train to escape.
A great hit in both England and the USA, The Lady Vanishes convinced producer David O. Selznick that Hitchcock could make it in Hollywood, forever changing the life of the director and American cinema. One can certainly see close links between this early film and the early work I previously mentioned, The Man Who Knew Too Much (a film the director made in 1934 and remade in Hollywood in 1956), which depends on a musical passage for a planned murder, and involves its characters, Jo and Ben McKenna, in an international abduction of their son and a political assassination for their having accidental knowledge of events. In the original story on which The Lady Vanishes was based, a novel The Wheel Spins by Ethel Lina White, the Miss Froy character is similarly an innocent who has acquired information without realizing its significance.
The structures and themes of this film reappear again and again in
Hitchcock’s later Hollywood works as well. No one can see The Lady Vanishes without thinking of Roger Thornhill of North by Northwest—a figure who has been
mistaken for a government
agent—engaged as well in a long secretive and romantic train ride. As in so
many of Hitchcock’s later films—one thinks immediately of The Wrong Man and Vertigo—no
one in this early film can be found who speaks the truth, while others
deliberately obfuscate.
In short, one might describe this 1938 hit as representing elemental
themes which the director would explore throughout his career: presumption of
guilt, the involvement of innocents in plots of international intrigue, and the
burial and removal of truth, which, when bravely and resolutely faced by those
who must battle these forces, often results in regeneration and renewal through
love.
Los Angeles, March 6, 2013
Reprinted from International Cinema Review (March 2013).
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