The Lady Vanishes is a 1938 film directed by Alfred Hitchcock and written by Sidney Gilliat and Frank Launder, based on the 1936 novel The Wheel Spins by Ethel Lina White. The film stars Margaret Lockwood and Michael Redgrave, with Dame May Whitty and Paul Lukas.

Though filmed in London, The Lady Vanishes caught Hollywood’s attention and Hitchcock moved there soon after its release, for David O Selznick was convinced of Hitchcock’s talent and believed he had a future in Hollywood cinema. Considered one of his most renowned British films, it’s ranked the 35th best British film of the 20th century by the British Film Institute.

Here is a link to quotes from the film, here‘s a link to the full movie, and here‘s a link to White’s novel.

In the novel, the female protagonist’s name is Iris Carr, whereas in the film, she is Iris Henderson (Lockwood). In the film, Henderson gets on a train and says goodbye to her female friends; in the novel, Carr’s friends get on the train while she, tiring of what she feels is oppressive human company, refuses to join them on it.

Instead, Carr goes wandering on the slope of a mountain in “a remote country in Europe (in the film, it’s a fictional country called “Bandrika”), for she is a young Englishwoman on vacation. She gets lost out there, and after only briefly enjoying her solitude, she soon comes to regret it, so she returns to her hotel, where she finds the other English guests similarly annoying.

In the film, Henderson’s only dislike of social convention is the marriage she is only reluctantly participating in. There is a sense, much more pronounced in the novel, of Iris not wanting to go along with social conventions. This reluctance of hers will have much more importance when…the lady vanishes, as we’ll soon see.

Many of the novel’s English guests are replaced in the film with such characters as the cricket-obsessed Charters and Caldicott (played by Basil Radford and Naunton Wayne, respectively), the comic relief of the film who would become very popular with filmgoers and reappear in such films as Night Train to Munich and Dead of Night (the Charles Crichton sequence).

As for Miss Froy (Whitty), in the novel, she’s just a governess and music teacher who accidentally learns of the misdeeds of the story’s antagonists, who then abduct her with the intention of killing her to silence her. In the film, however, she is a spy pretending to be a governess and music teacher. (In the novel, a character named Max Hare, who on-and-off helps Iris, imagines a hypothetical situation in which Froy could be secretly a spy [in Chapter XXV, “Strange Disappearance”].)

In the novel, Hare–a young British engineer who knows the local language–is replaced by Gilbert Redman (Redgrave), a musicologist. Gilbert begins by irritating the hell out of Iris by playing his clarinet to stomping dancers in the hotel room directly above hers. After she has the manager remove Gilbert from his room, the uncouth musicologist imposes himself on her by using her room for his accommodations without her consent, infuriating her all the more. But about halfway into the film, he proves himself the only real friend she has, in that he’s the only one who believes her that Miss Froy exists.

So a recurring theme in both the film and novel is that nothing is as it seems. Gilbert seems a cad, but he becomes not only a true friend to Iris but also her love interest by the end of the film. Miss Froy in the film seems to be a mere governess and music teacher, a sweet and innocent–if rather chatty–middle-aged woman, but it turns out she is a spy. A patient with bandages all over her face, we learn close to the end of the novel and an hour and thirteen minutes into the film, is the abducted Miss Froy. The Todhunters are believed to be honeymooners, but we eventually learn that they are an adulterous couple.

Just before getting on the train to leave the hotel, Iris becomes a tad disoriented after something drops on her head (in the novel, she suffers sunstroke). Her disorientation is used by the schemers who have abducted Miss Froy to make her doubt her memory and perception. I’ll come back to this issue soon enough, and I’ll expand on its significance.

Froy speaks, at a hotel dinner table with Charters and Caldicott, of how much she loves it in Bandrika. The two men, unimpressed with anything other than cricket, have no interest in the country or its culture, so as she is rambling on and on about the snow-capped mountains and the ubiquitous singing, the men rest their heads on their hands in boredom waiting for her to stop. (In the novel, it’s Iris on the train who is annoyed with Froy’s ceaseless chatter).

Froy’s interest in the locals’ music isn’t merely a sentimental one, though, as we eventually learn. As she is listening, from her hotel window that night, to a man singing a tune and playing a guitar, she’s tapping her hands to the music’s rhythm, for in this tune is a secret code she must bring back to England, something connected with certain unsavoury things the movie’s antagonists are planning to do. For this reason, the singer/guitarist is killed, and Froy is to be abducted, the antagonists pretending she doesn’t even exist. These intrigues for which she must be silenced aren’t in the novel, though.

Instead, in the novel, Froy is aware of “a small but growing Communist element” that she euphemistically calls “the leader of the opposition” in the country where she’s working as a governess. This “element” has accused her late, aristocrat employer “of corruption and all sorts of horrors” (which shouldn’t be surprising, since communists consider feudalism to be far worse than capitalism). Froy feels that these political matters are none of her business, so she doesn’t want to take sides. Still, one night she witnesses her employer using her bathroom to wash up (Chapter VIII–“Tea Interval”). She innocently thinks nothing of it, but later on we learn that he was washing blood off of himself after having committed a murder (Chapter XXVI–“Signature”). The aristocrat family employing her don’t know how much she knows, which she might share with the Reds, so the lady must…vanish. Hence, the Baroness in the coupé with Froy and Iris.

Now, when the lady vanishes from her seat on the train, and Iris asks the others in their coupé, they all deny Froy’s existence. Iris is shocked and amazed that they could deny her friend, for Froy has clearly been among them up until Iris, still reeling from her hit on the head (or sunstroke), needed to take a brief nap.

This denial of Froy’s existence extends to everyone on the train, though not necessarily for the same reasons as the Baroness and her family. Still, these people are lying in their denials, denying something so obvious to Iris. In this lying, we see an early example of something that would eventually get the name of gaslighting. Now, The Wheel Spins was published in 1936; The Lady Vanishes came out in 1938; and Patrick Hamilton‘s play, Gas Light, premiered in December of that year. The American movie version of his play, starring Ingrid Bergman and Charles Boyer, came out in 1944 (and incidentally, Dame May Whitty also had a supporting role in that film). So there is an amazing prescience in both the novel and Hitchcock’s film.

Gaslighting isn’t the only thing that The Lady Vanishes is prescient about, though. There is a political subtext in the film suggesting, in allegorical form, the lead-up to WWII. The conspiracy not only to abduct Miss Froy but also to deny her very existence is ignored by the British passengers on the train (apart from Iris and Gilbert, of course), except for when the train is detoured and stopped in a forest, where the British are now forced to confront the antagonists, who plan to shoot them all. These antagonists can be seen to represent such European fascists as those of Nazi Germany, Italy under Mussolini (recall the Italian magician in Iris’s cabin, Signor Doppo, played by Philip Leaver, who gets into a fight with Gilbert over the acquisition of Froy’s eyeglasses), Romania, Hungary, Poland, and Francoist Spain.

This late involvement of the other British passengers in Iris’s and Gilbert’s confrontation with the Bandrika conspirators can be paralleled with British appeasement of, if not outright support of, fascism in the 1930s (recall that infamous footage of members of the British royal family doing Nazi salutes). One needn’t look to Chamberlain‘s appeasement of Hitler in Munich, which happened just a week or so before the release of The Lady Vanishes.

[Note how Chamberlain-like Mr. Todhunter wants to avoid conflict with the antagonists right to his very death, when he foolishly gets out of the train to wave a handkerchief as a flag of surrender, then gets shot. I’m as anti-war as they come, but even I know when an enemy is so implacable, as the film’s antagonists are, that war with them is unavoidable.]

The fact is that fascism has always been used to further the interests of the ruling class, regardless of whether they’re capitalists or feudal aristocrats like the Baroness and her family in the film and novel. Britain and the other western capitalist countries began to oppose the fascists only when the latter began muscling in on the former’s imperialist turf, rather like when Charters picks up a pistol to shoot at the antagonists only after one of them has shot him in the hand.

So the climactic shoot-out in the train in the woods can be seen as prescient of, and therefore in this sense allegorical of, WWII, or of political conflicts in general, anyway. It is in this political context that we can begin to understand not only the true meaning of the gaslighting of Iris but also her sense of social alienation and Froy’s abduction, disappearance, and denial of existence. This understanding applies in both the film and the novel. In Chapter XXXII–“The Dream,” we learn of how “When she [Iris] was a child she suffered from an unsuspected inferiority complex, due to the difference between her lot and that of other children.” This feeling of being different, of not being able to fit in with other people, can lead to a tendency to see the world differently from the mainstream crowd, and to see injustice where others don’t see it.

How often are criminal acts, the ones that really matter, hidden from the public view, as Froy’s abduction and disappearance can be seen to symbolize? The ruling classes, the imperialists, the settler-colonialists, and the fascists commit the worst crimes in the world, and through their wealth and power, they usually get away with their crimes. Indeed, in the novel, Hare tells Iris that the Baroness will use her influence to evade being implicated in the conspiracy now that the doctor and his assistants have been arrested (Chapter XXXIII–“The Herald”).

Similarly, the powerful use their influence to marginalize all those who would challenge power structures and demand inquiries into any injustices committed, as Iris is isolated when she demands that Miss Froy be found. Evidence of crimes is eliminated or denied, as is the very existence of Miss Froy. Such an elimination of evidence is happening right as I type this, with the cutting-off of communications in Gaza while the genocide of the Palestinians is going on; elsewhere, many still deny that the Holocaust ever happened.

All of this brings us back to the central theme of the film, which I brought up earlier: nothing is as it seems. Dr. Hartz (Lukas) seems helpful to Iris and Gilbert, yet he participates in the gaslighting and intends to drug the two. In fact, the “nun” (bizarrely wearing high heels and played by Catherine Lacey), who under Hartz’s orders is to drug the drinks of Iris and Gilbert, never does so; our two protagonists fool Hartz by pretending to be unconscious until he leaves their cabin.

The nun is not only pretending to be such, but also to be deaf and dumb; furthermore, her loyalty to Hartz and the other conspirators is only apparent and ephemeral, for as soon as she realizes that Iris, Gilbert, and Froy are British, her own British patriotism is kindled, so she quickly switches from the antagonists’ to the protagonists’ side.

Hers is an example of the many British passengers waiting so long before switching to the good side, these Chamberlains of the film. The Todhunters don’t want to acknowledge Froy for fear of an inquiry leading to publicity and a scandalous exposure of their affair to their spouses. Charters and Caldicott won’t acknowledge Froy for fear of the resulting inquiry delaying the train, making them miss their so-fetishized cricket match (which ends up being cancelled due to flooding, anyway).

We see in these examples how selfishness gets in the way of justice, and it’s the obstinacy of our social misfits like Iris who ensure justice in spite of the odds. After all, she’s such a misfit, at the last minute she decides not to get together with her fiancé when back in England, preferring the uncouth Gilbert instead.

Making Froy into a spy, rather than just someone who’s innocently stumbled upon a criminal act without realizing its significance, was an improvement on the novel. Ending the film with a reunion of her–playing the coded tune on the piano–with Iris and Gilbert was also an improvement on the novel’s rather dull, anticlimactic ending, with Froy arriving at home and reuniting with “Mater,” “Pater,” and their dog, Sock, which is rather drawn-out and sentimentalized. The story works best as a political thriller, showing how going against the grain is often the best way to win out against the wicked in the world.