The Lady Vanishes

"You're the most contemptible person I've ever met in all my life!"

" Confidentially, I think you're a bit of a stinker, too."

Ahhhhh....doesn't all love start with words like this??  Well, at least that's how it begins with Margaret Lockwood and Michael Redgrave.  The above is my favorite banter between them from The Lady Vanishes.  

What....is it?

It's a spy movie, it's a love story, it's a thriller....it's a political message wrapped inside a thriller...??  Let's talk about it in the latter sense.  That's how I view it.  If I analyze this movie as any of the other ways, I lose interest.  But it's a movie, done in 1938, a time of world turmoil, death camps, war, bombs, deaths, drafts....and of course...spies! 

Miss Froy (centered).  An unlikely spy.

Hitchcock liked to play with censorship as best he could for the time his movies are made.  He did his best to show how the world was changing.  That people were not people to Hitler, but something to dominate and overcome.  But the people, in 1938 were just a couple of years shy of knowing that.  But it was coming.  Their innocence to world politics was changing.  And Hitchcock didn't put this message in this movie by accident.

The Lady Vanishes was made largely in 1937, and released in 1938. In England at that time, the big political question of the day was should we appease Hitler or prepare to fight him?  The shootout scene at the end of the movie shows the audience just what Alfred Hitchcock wants England to do.

In one scene, one of the English passengers shouts amidst the gunfire with the conspirators outside the halted train, “They can’t possibly do anything to us, we’re British subjects”. It is especially disheartening to see how naïve people of the 1930s and 40s were toward the evils going on around them. Another passenger storms out of the train waving a white-flag in the direction of the foreign conspirators, only to be shot dead in his tracks. The director’s point is clear – England can not appease Hitler and survive.

More...

Ok.....next time Rope....I promise!