The Lady Vanishes

The last great film of Alfred Hitchcock's British period, The Lady Vanishes was released in 1938, as the political weather it gently satirises was closing in across the Continent. It won the director the New York Film Critics' Best Director prize and effectively secured his passage to Hollywood the following year, where David O. Selznick was waiting.

Margaret Lockwood and Michael Redgrave are the bickering pair drawn together by the disappearance of Dame May Whitty's tweedy Miss Froy, and the screenplay by Sidney Gilliat and Frank Launder keeps the comedy and the menace in perfect balance. Confined almost entirely to a moving train, the film is a marvel of economy, its cricket-obsessed Englishmen — Naunton Wayne and Basil Radford, so popular they would reappear in other films — and its shifting carriages concealing a tightening espionage plot beneath the banter. Hitchcock conjures suspense from the simplest materials: a name written in steam, a vanishing face, a packet of tea.

It has remained one of the most beloved of all his pictures, admired for its wit as much as its tension, and its closed-world structure — strangers trapped together as the truth unravels — has been borrowed endlessly since. Light on its feet yet quietly pointed about a Europe sleepwalking toward catastrophe, it is the work of a film-maker operating at the height of his English powers, and a permanent fixture on lists of the country's finest films.