The Lady Vanishes (1938 Film)

The Lady Vanishes (1938 Film)

The Lady Vanishes is a 1938 British comic thriller film directed by Alfred Hitchcock and starring Margaret Lockwood, Michael Redgrave, Paul Lukas and Dame May Whitty. Written by Sidney Gilliat and Frank Launder based on the 1936 novel The Wheel Spins by Ethel Lina White, the film is about a beautiful English tourist travelling by train in Europe who discovers that her elderly travelling companion seems to have disappeared from the train. After her fellow passengers deny ever having seen the elderly lady, the young woman is helped by a young musicologist, and the two proceed to search the train for clues to the old woman's disappearance. The film features Basil Radford and Naunton Wayne playing the characters Charters and Caldicott, two single-minded cricket enthusiasts who are rushing back to England to see the last days of a Test match.

The Lady Vanishes is Hitchcock's penultimate film made in the United Kingdom before his move to the United States. Following three films that did not do well at the box office, the success of The Lady Vanishes confirmed the opinion of American producer David O. Selznick that Hitchcock indeed had a future in making films in Hollywood. The film remains one of Hitchcock's two or three best known British films. A remake of the film, also titled The Lady Vanishes, was made in 1979, and in March 2013 the BBC broadcast a new adaptation for television. It starred Tuppence Middleton as Iris.