Alfred Hitchcock's THE LADY VANISHES (Classic Revival)

Music Box - Saturday and Sunday, 11:30am
Although film schools all teach a semester-long course on Alfred Hitchcock, they might as well just show 1938's THE LADY VANISHES on the first day of freshman year and tell the students he never got it quite as right again. In the director's penultimate UK feature, the plot is tight and the action is full of suspense, but it is the characters that keep us entertained throughout. Margaret Atwood's heroine and Michael Redgrave's unlikely academic hero lead the cast in this tale of international espionage (on a train, of course), but the supporting duo of Caldicott & Charters (Naunton Wayne and Basil Radford) steal their scenes as a pair of dry humored Brits only interested in a cricket match back home. With an overt critique of Britain's pre-war non-intervention policy woven in, the sometimes slapstick, sometimes understated humor of Hitchcock charms us throughout the film in a way that only resurfaced occasionally in his US work. Francois Truffaut, who claimed to have seen the film twice a week at some points, told Hitchcock "Since I know it by heart, I tell myself each time that I’m going to ignore the plot (and study the technique and effect). But each time, I become so absorbed by the characters and the story that I’ve yet to figure out the mechanics of the film.” (1938, 97 min, 35mm) JH - Cine-File.info