The Enduring Legacy of The Lady Vanishes

THE LADY VANISHES - Timeless Classics

Exactly forty years ago, the world of film suffered a tragic loss when Sir Alfred Hitchcock left this mortal coil. His influence on cinema cannot be overstated, as he is often credited as one of the pioneers of what we define as a thriller. He inspired generations of filmmakers – such as Brian De Palma, Dario Argento and William Friedkin – among others; many of his movies, like Vertigo, Psycho and Rear Window, are consistently mentioned among the greatest works of cinema. 

Hitchcock’s legacy extends well beyond a laundry list of masterpieces and includes an arsenal of narrative templates, which have since evolved to become widely used archetypes. Examples include a voyeur accidentally witnessing a crime in Rear Window or the wrong man on the run, originating in The Lodger and The Thirty-Nine Steps, which Hitchcock himself would revisit on multiple occasions. Between many such plot devices and influential themes, the archetype of a woman going missing, originating in The Lady Vanishes, is particularly interesting. This movie is already important for many reasons. Adapted from a novel The Wheel Spins, it was Hitchcock’s last British movie before moving to Hollywood. In fact, its financial success was the very reason he was given an opportunity to take his career across the pond. However, the central conceit of a woman disappearing into thin air and a subsequent intrigue involving forcing the characters and the audience to doubt her existence is the film’s most important aspect that seems to have survived in cinema under different guises. By simply removing the woman from the equation and building an elaborate plot around this event with spies, guns, politics and psychological manipulation, Hitchcock’s film manufactured a potent platform for other filmmakers to deploy. 

For instance, in 1965 – at the height of a post-Psycho Hithcockian genre craze – Otto Preminger directed Bunny Lake is missing. Although it was itself adapted from a novel, the film was drawing heavily from The Lady Vanishes, as its story revolved around a mother searching for her missing daughter while everyone around her tried to convince her the girl did not exist at all. Interestingly though, its unequivocally Hitchcockian DNA was spiced up by an equally strong inspiration derived from Gaslight. This new perspective gave the archetype of a vanishing girl a completely new flavour and elevated the entire movie to become more than a slave to its influences. By shifting the centre of gravity away from the primary intrigue and towards the idea of manipulating the protagonist’s perception of reality, Preminger’s movie managed to untether itself somewhat from The Lady Vanishes and became an independent projector of influence. For example, it could be argued the 2005 Jodie Foster-starring Flightplan is more a descendant of Preminger’s movie than Hitchcock’s – even though it functions superficially as a loose remake of The Lady Vanishes.  

Usage in genre movies notwithstanding, the perennial importance of this devilishly simple archetype was cemented when it became a tool to be used in other contexts. Michelangelo Antonioni’s L’Avventura is a phenomenal example illustrating this notion, as it uses the device of a woman who disappears during a boat trip as nothing more than a catalyst for the two main characters (Gabriele Ferzetti and Monica Vitti) to embark on their respective arcs. In fact, it doesn’t matter whether the missing woman is found or not. Antonioni’s film isn’t about the mystery behind the disappearance nor the quest to find out what exactly happened, but rather about how this event impacts on other people and how it illuminates their own insecurities. This idea of using well-worn genre tropes as red herrings was something he would often come back to (Blow-Up, The Passenger), as it was an opportunity to torment both the protagonists and the audience. L’Avventura accomplishes just that by employing a device that organically invited some sort of an intrigue but instead was an excuse to force the viewer to look in all the wrong places for answers while the filmmaker was busy painting an intricate landscape of human pain. 

A somewhat similar approach to the same idea was employed by Asghar Farhadi, who drew from The Lady Vanishes on two distinct occasions in About Elly and Everybody Knows. In the first of the two movies, he used it to make very subtle but stinging comments about the state of Iranian society. Just like Antonioni, he was able to shift the focus organically ingrained in the archetype and mould it into a narrative excuse to have an honest discussion about the dynamics between genders and how important a parameter the highly conservative Iranian culture is in this equation. On the other hand, in Everybody Knows he applied this device in a shape much closer to the original recipe, as the film balances between addressing the intrigue of a possible kidnapping, exploring the unresolved romantic past between the leads (Javier Bardem and Penélope Cruz) and commenting on some very specific class divisions between the haves and have-nots. 

Interestingly, another film – Lee Chang-dong’s Burning – does something similar. Hailed as an enigmatic masterpiece, the movie draws from The Lady Vanishes in a way that Antonioni did in L’Avventura but for reasons symmetrical to those of Farhadi’s – if that makes any sense. He promises a compelling mystery and draws the viewer down the rabbit hole of red herrings and character twists only to leave them discombobulated at the end of the road when it is revealed there is no expected resolution to this intrigue. Instead, the audience is left in limbo and only then it becomes apparent that Burning is using its Hitchcockian template to make subtle observations about rifts between castes in the Korean society and address the pent-up frustrations permeating the poorer classes. 

These various examples dispersed across the axis of time show just how influential The Lady Vanishes continues to be to this day, even though many of the aforementioned titles are rarely traced back to Hitchcock in film criticism. Although it may be somewhat disappointing to any fan of Hitchcock’s work – especially because he was criminally underappreciated for years before being reappraised by Truffaut and Godard – this apparent detachment of the archetype from its progenitor may be seen as its natural evolution. Perhaps its existence is now axiomatic: self-evident and hence taken for granted. Therefore, now – four decades after he passed away – it is a perfect opportunity to remind the world the existence and popularity of the narrative.