Sight and Sound (2008) - Mystery Train
Details
- article: Mystery Train
- author(s): Graham Fuller
- journal: Sight and Sound (01/Jan/2008)
- issue: volume 18, issue 1, pages 36-40
- journal ISSN: 0037-4806
- publisher: British Film Institute
- keywords: 20th Century Limited, Actors, Adaptations, Alfred Hitchcock, Artistic expression, Basil Radford, British cinema, Charles Bennett, Dame May Whitty, Ethel Lina White, Feature films, Film (International), Film (Productions), Film directors, Film history, Forth Bridge, Scotland, Frank Launder, François Truffaut, Gainsborough Pictures, Graham Fuller, Islington Studios, London, John Buchan, John Gielgud, Joseph Jefferson Farjeon, MacGuffin, Madeleine Carroll, Margaret Lockwood, Mark Glancy, Marlene Dietrich, Michael Redgrave, Mount Rushmore, South Dakota, Narrative style, Naunton Wayne, Night Train to Munich (1940), North by Northwest (1959), Number Seventeen (1932), Oeuvre, Paramount Pictures, Paul Lukas, Plot, Raymond Durgnat, Re-releases, Robert Donat, Robert Young, Roger Greenspun, Roger O. Thornhill, Scenes, Screenplays, Screenwriters, Secret Agent (1936), Sexuality, Shadow of a Doubt (1943), Sidney Gilliat, Strangers on a Train (1951), Suspicion (1941), The 39 Steps (1935), The Birds (1963), The Lady Vanishes (1938), Trains, W. Somerset Maugham, Young and Innocent (1937)
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Abstract
The film's re-release coincides with the centenaries of Michael Redgrave and Sidney Gilliat, who wrote the screenplay with his partner Frank Launder. 2008 is also the 70th anniversary of the film itself, and of Neville Chamberlain's disastrous "peace for our time" speech, which he made on returning from Munich on 30 September 1938, three months before The Lady Vanishes' Christmas Day premiere. Back projection, process shots, transparencies, archival footage, railway noises and wisps of steam drifting through an open window give a semblance of realism to the train itself - probably the Arlberg Orient Express - but modern audiences understand that it never existed outside a sound stage.
Article
For The Lady Vanishes, Alfred Hitchcock invented a quirkily archetypal version of the English abroad with a steam train, light banter, cricket obsessives, tweedy spies and phallic symbols. By Graham Fuller
This was a railway coupling made in dreamtime. In Alfred Hitchcock's The Lady Vanishes, Margaret Lockwood and Michael Redgrave, playing a London socialite and her admirer on a trans-European express carrying a smorgasbord of Axis conspirators, brought a sexy screwball frisson to the staid British cinema of the late 1930s. England may have been "on the brink", but the blinkered English weren't prepared to let imminent war divert them from their passions. Two quintessential Englishmen, Charters (Basil Radford) and Caldicott (Naunton Wayne), fret about making it to a Manchester Test Match on time. The musical folklorist Gilbert (Redgrave) frets about making it with Iris Henderson (Lockwood) before she marries for money a few days hence. Iris frets about Miss Froy (Dame May Whitty), the tweedy governess whose disappearance shortly after departure indicates foul play.
The film's re-release coincides with the centenaries of Michael Redgrave and Sidney Gilliat, who wrote the screenplay with his partner Frank Launder. 2008 is also the 70th anniversary of the film itself, and of Neville Chamberlain's disastrous "peace for our time" speech, which he made on returning from Munich on 30 September 1938, three months before The Lady Vanishes' Christmas Day premiere. Launder and Gilliat had had their ears to the ground. "Never climb a fence if you can sit on it. It's an old Foreign Office proverb," Gilbert observes. And an odious pro-appeasement barrister pays the ultimate price for refusing to fight the villainous Dr Hartz (Paul Lukas) and his militia after they've diverted the train on to a siding.
It's tempting to seek topicality in the appeasement theme, the espionage plot and the film's meditation on Englishness, but none of these elements resonates much today. What does is Hitchcock's manipulation of Iris' consciousness and, through the use of the train as a vehicle for dreaming, the idea that she, not Miss Froy (the literal disappearee), is the lady who vanishes. Then there's her banter with Gilbert - the kind of droll to-and-fro sadly missing from contemporary comedy. Back projection, process shots, transparencies, archival footage, railway noises and wisps of steam drifting through an open ...
