Movie Description

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, who for the first time, play the characters Charters and Caldicott, two single-minded cricket enthusiasts who are rushing back to England to catch the last days of a Test match.

The Lady Vanishes was made in the Gainsborough Studios in Islington, London. It is Hitchcock's penultimate British film; he moved to Hollywood soon after its release. Although the director's three previous efforts had done poorly at the box office, The Lady Vanishes was widely successful, and confirmed American producer David O. Selznick's belief that Hitchcock indeed had a future in Hollywood cinema. Having remained one of Hitchcock's most renowned British films over the years, a remake (also titled The Lady Vanishes) was released in 1979, and in March 2013 the BBC broadcast a TV adaptation starring Tuppence Middleton as Iris.