The Lady Vanishes on a Hot Night
It was 27 °C in the back room at nine in the evening, the fan was going, and I wanted something that would not ask too much. I chose The Lady Vanishes because I remembered it as a tight little thriller on a train. What I had forgotten, or never noticed, is that the first act is almost entirely a comedy about a snowbound hotel in an invented country where nobody can get a room. Margaret Lockwood and her friends drink champagne and complain; two English cricket enthusiasts fret about missing the match; Michael Redgrave plays clarinet music through the ceiling and is thoroughly insufferable. The train does not even leave until well past the twenty-minute mark.
I found this delightful rather than slow, which surprised me. The jokes are quick and dry and the hotel manager’s running battle with his guests still lands. By the time the elderly governess appears, with her tweed and her tea, you know everybody well enough that the shift into something more sinister actually works. The film earns its mystery by making you comfortable first.
What struck me most was how modern the pacing of the dialogue is. People talk over each other. Lines are thrown away. Nobody waits for a laugh. The sound recording is thin and I had to turn the volume up three notches past where I usually keep it, but the rhythm of the thing is not old at all.
The print on my library disc is soft and a little milky in the snow scenes, and the model shot of the hotel in the opening is clearly a model, which I enjoyed in the way one enjoys a doll’s house. None of it matters. By the time the train pulled out I had stopped noticing the heat.
I will not say what happens after the governess goes to sleep. I will say that I had assumed the title was a metaphor and it is not, and that I sat up straighter the moment it stopped being a comedy. A good choice for a hot night: light, fast, and finished by half past ten.