The Lady Vanishes

A while back I gave the great master Alfred Hitchcock a bad review. I disliked Rope, and quite a bit too. Thus, it is only fair now to acknowledge a masterpiece of his. So here is: The Lady Vanishes. Simple enough story too, a beautiful woman named Iris (scintillating Margaret Lockwood) is aboard a train, she befriends an older woman named Miss Froy (Dame May Whitty), and then she falls and hits her head. Iris and Miss Froy are in the train compartment with two foreigners and Iris gets up to go nurse her head. Upon her return, Miss Froy is gone. She searches. Finds nothing. She asks around. Nothing. Everyone seems to have become suddenly foreign, and insist there is no Miss Froy. Iris goes crazy thinking about if Miss Froy ever really existed. (A turn that I looked at while considering realism). Tension builds, truths emerge. This is quintessential in the plethora of Hitchcock work. It clearly shows his mastery over suspense. The film was made in 1938, and it is more suspenseful, witty, and exciting than most of the films I've seen in 2010. The fetishes of the director are also pretty great: his obsession with silly light switches, boxes. The Lady Vanishes is by far not the best film of Alfred Hitchcock, but it is still undeniably good.
The Lady Vanishes: ★★★1/2