Bride-to-be Iris (Margaret Lockwood) is heading back to London from the tiny eastern European country of Mandrika by train. After being inadvertently hit on the head by a stone, she has the happy luck to make the acquaintance of the elderly Miss Froy (Dame May Whitty), a former governess and a charming woman who takes it upon herself to look after her young fellow passenger, the two sharing a cup of tea in the dining car.

But when Miss Froy disappears, no one believes Iris that the old woman was ever on the train (let alone exists), an all-knowing Prauge neurosurgeon (Paul Lukas) insisting her memories of the lady are all a hallucination brought about by the bump on her head. But the young debutante is undeterred, and enlisting the help of handsome ethnomusicologist Gilbert (Michael Redgrave) she takes it upon herself to find Miss Froy and prove to everyone she really and truly has been abducted and not everything is as it seems upon this train as it makes its way back to civilized Euorpe.

CRITIQUE

It’s hard not to love The Lady Vanishes. Working from an incredibly witty script by Sidney Gilliatt and Frank Laudner (itself adapted from the story The Wheel Spins by Ethel Lina White), Alfred Hitchcock’s 1938 classic is a frothy, effervescent mystery-thriller with more twists and turns than a Chubby Checker dance routine. The movie’s 96 minutes whiz by in the blink of an eye, and even though the central plot doesn’t truly kick in until almost half an hour has past everything is so precisely plotted and intricately structured the whole thing almost can’t help but work beyond beautifully.

Okay, so sure it isn’t much of a surprise to discover who the true villain is, but as Iris herself is the one to figure it out with sarcastically dry bravado, her reaction to this revelation is almost an afterthought, it kind of doesn’t matter that this pivotal reveal is treated as a minor throwaway. Additionally, a twist keeping her and Gilbert out of harm’s way is kind of silly, but then the character responsible for it becomes something of a rousing hero so the fact their change in sides happened with such astonishing speed ends up not mattering near as much as it maybe could have otherwise.

The bottom line here is that The Lady Vanishes is so confidently directed by Hitchcock, so lovingly acted by Lockwood, Redgrave, Lukas and Whitty, so beautifully shot by the forgotten Jack Cox and edited by R.E. Dearing, the whole thing becomes this great delectable bubbly bit of murderous fun impossible to have problems with. This is a movie that showcases the director just as his powers were coming fully into his grasp, and you get the feeling that there isn’t a single moment, a single bit of lighting, a single actor’s performance, nothing at all, that he hadn’t planned for and plotted out well before filming had begun.

Is The Lady Vanishes lesser Hitchcock? Heck, no. Right before this he made The 39 Steps. Just two years later he would grace everyone with Rebecca. Not too long after that would come Shadow of a Doubt. To say this movie fits right in with that lot would be a colossal understatement, and even though the lightness in tone marks it as a bit different the expert precision and the brilliance in the execution of bringing it to fruition is equally as luminous here as it is with any of those marvelous classics. You can’t love Hitchcock without loving The Lady Vanishes, I think it’s an actual rule written down in some book somewhere, and it’s hard to imagine he’d have been able to make beloved timeless chestnuts like Rear Window, To Catch a Thief or North by Northwest decades later if he hadn’t made this one all those years prior first.

THE VIDEO

The Lady Vanishes is presented on a dual-layer 50GB Blu-ray MPEG-4 AVC Video with a 1.33:1/1080p transfer. As stated in the included booklet: “This high-definition transfer was created on a Spirit Datacine from a 35mm composite fine-grain master positive. Thousands of instances of dirt, debris, scratches, splices, warps, jitter, and flicker were manually removed using MTI's DRS and Pixel Farm's PFClean, while Image Systems' DVNR was used for small dirt, grain, and noise reduction.”

THE AUDIO

The Lady Vanishes comes to Blu-ray in English LPCM 1.0 Master Audio and includes optional English SDH subtitles. Again, from the included booklet: “The original monaural soundtrack was remastered at 24-bit from a 35mm optical track print. Clicks, thumps, hiss, and hum were manually removed using Pro Tools HD. Crackle was attenuated using AudioCube's integrated workstation.”

THE EXTRAS

Extras are ported over from the previous Criterion DVD and include:

·         Crook’s Tour (1:20:59)

·         Audio Commentary with film historian Bruce Eder

·         Hitchcock/Truffaut (10:06)

·         Mystery Train – Video Essay by film scholar Leonard Leff (33:32)

·         Still Gallery

Let’s start with 1941’s Crook’s Tour, a slight but oh-so-entertaining frolic reuniting Charters (Basil Radford) and Caldicott (Naunton Wayne) for a new adventure. The movie isn’t all that fulfilling, truth be told, and not much of consequence happens, but these two are just so great together and the humor is such a chuckle-worthy delight it’s hard to not think of watching the film as 81 well-spent minutes. I got a kick out of it, and I think most fans of The Lady Vanishes probably will, too.

As for the rest, all of it is incredibly solid, and Hitchcock enthusiasts deserve it to themselves to makes sure and give it all a look, maybe even multiple ones (save for probably the still gallery, the reasons why on that front are probably self-evident). The audio commentary with Eder is arguably the highlight, but that snippet from that legendary 1962 audio interview by French auteur François Truffaut with Hitchcock is a massive, thoroughly engaging joy as well.

The Blu-ray also comes with a 20-page Illustrated Booklet featuring essays by critic Geoffrey O'Brien and Hitchcock scholar Charles Barr.

FINAL THOUGHTS

The Lady Vanishes is one of Alfred Hitchcock’s most overlooked and sometimes forgotten gems. It also just happens to be a great amount of fun as well. Criterion’s Blu-ray presentation is immaculate, and fans of the cinematic master would be doing themselves a gigantic favor by adding this title to their personal collections.