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The Lady Vanishes
Friday, February 13, 2009


Last night's class was The Lady Vanishes - a movie I've never seen before and which I enjoyed very much, but more in the way you would enjoy a Marx Brothers movie than a typical Hitch. The opening sequence in the Tyrolean style hotel is very funny and saucy - lots of girls getting dressed and undressed, the Morecambe and Wise duo of Caldicott and Charters (they sound like a pair of dodgy accountants), the lovely Iris (Margaret Lockwood) getting ready to return to England for her wedding and Gilbert the musicologist (played by the deliciously louche Michael Redgrave) getting hotel staff to perform (very badly) local folk dances. It's frankly daft. Peter Ustinov should have been in this part. Most of the action takes place on the train itself with lots of claustrophobic squeezings past people in the corridor and several people vanishing. There's a very untypical shoot out with krypto nazis and everything comes right in the end - if you ignore quite a high random body count. The class divided along gender lines - the women mostly enjoyed it very much - the men were in doubt as to its true Hitchcockian nature (the heroine is a brunette for God's sake!). Sometimes I think I couldn't be happier than I am on Thursday nights at the Tyneside. Check out this video made by a real fan.

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