Courtesy of ITV Global Entertainment

If one film challenges the idea that Hitchcock 'found himself' as a director only after he arrived in Hollywood, it is The Lady Vanishes. Released in 1938 by Gainsborough, it is arguably the most accomplished, and certainly the wittiest of Hitchcock's British films, and is up there with the best of his American work.

In Michael Redgrave (in his first film role), Hitchcock found a leading man whose urbane charisma - and his comic timing - rivals that of Cary Grant, while co-star Margaret Lockwood has a warmth which fascinatingly contrasts with the coolness of his American female stars like Ingrid Bergman or Grace Kelly.

Written by the young partnership of Frank Launder and Sidney Gilliat, later well known for their St. Trinian's films in the '50s and '60s, the story is blessed by great characters and many witty and imaginative touches, in particular the conceit by which the passengers are each given selfish motives for refusing to verify Iris' story. As well as the chemistry between the two leads, the film has some of Hitchcock's best character parts, with Basil Radford and Naunton Wayne particularly good value as the cricket obsessed Charters and Caldicott.

The film also contains several elements familiar from earlier Hitchcock films: a shadowy conspiracy with unspecified aims; a vital clue in the form of a piece of music (as in The 39 Steps (1935)); a female villain, apparently mute, who ultimately turns against her co-conspirators (reminiscent of Number Seventeen (1932)); and, a Hitchcock favourite, the man and woman (more or less) reluctantly forced together by adversity (The 39 Steps, Young and Innocent (1937) and a number of US films, especially Saboteur (1942), Notorious (1946) and North by Northwest (1959)).

Mark Duguid

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