Another point from “The Art of Hitchcock”:
“As in ‘The Man Who Knew Too Much’ and ‘The 39 Steps,’ the politics are again vague, but here the reason was as much the restrictions of British censorship as much as the writers’ deliberate ambiguity: In 1937 and 1938, English films had to maintain a steadfast neutrality about events in Germany and about German expansion throughout Europe. But this requirement paradoxically freed ‘The Lady Vanishes.’ Instead of serving a specific politic, the film became a tightly woven tale in which all appearances are deceiving and characters are sprung free for new relationships.”
9 comments:
Some account should have been given of why the baddies needed to resort to such a Rube Goldberg production to bump off a rival agent. Why didn’t they just stick a knife in her and throw her off the train? Perhaps there could have been political reasons?
It has been ages since I’ve seen it, but I remember the political environment of “The 39 Steps” being a very good fit for the film. Giving an impassioned speech on the desperate need for action against the clear-and-present danger in front of the wrong political party was a brilliant bit.
I guess some suspension of disbelief is called for -- as is often the case in Hitchcock films ("North by Northwest," especially), but I thought Miss Froy's whereabouts in the form of a brain surgery patient was an ingenious plot twist. I don't know; as preposterous as it might have felt, I love that the plot is driven out of concern for a seemingly muddled, missing elderly lady. Nowadays, she'd be recast as a smoking hot blonde washed up on a beach where nobody solving the case needs to wear much clothing.
I'd like to know the particulars of how the censors handled "The Lady Vanishes" in 1938 versus "The 39 Steps" in 1935. I didn't even realize beforehand that there were censors to contend with.
The vague politics bugged me a little bit. They seemed obviously and purposefully vague. Oddly enough, though, I never questioned the elaborate brain surgery plot. It seems especially silly since they wind up just shooting at her as she runs across a field.
Cl, in “The 39 Steps”, the agents were clearly identified as Prussian, weren’t they? But the setting was also the prior war, not contemporary Europe. I agree that our film suffers a bit from the abstractness of the spy/counter spy theme. Not only are the counter agents from no particular place, but we also don’t get a sense that the intelligence is going to be all that important to Britain. What if it is only the number of brass buttons on the dictator’s new uniform?
We can get funding for your spies-at-a-nudist-resort flick, Cl. Where do you want to shoot? South Pacific?
I love it! We need a young Anne Lambert for the part of the blonde.
Tag Line: I’ve got Nothing to Hide
The vague politics didn't really bother me. I just took for granted that it was some sketchy Kafkaesque type thing, with broad hints of a fascist menace looming that would have been understood in pre-war Europe. To have fleshed it out might have detracted from the literariness of the story in some way or made it feel overtly partisan.
I love that it had an old-lady spy.
I agree with all of kc's points. Except that I don't know what Kafkaesque means.
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