“Pacifist, eh? Won’t work, old boy. Early Christians tried it and got thrown to the lions.”

One of the last films Alfred Hitchcock made before hopping the pond for Hollywood, The Lady Vanishes begins as an ensemble screwball comedy before settling into the familiar patterns of a mystery-thriller. At an overcrowded provincial inn in the European countryside, a cosmopolitan throng of travelers vie for room and board while awaiting the next morning’s train. All’s well until everyone’s aboard the train, when one of the passengers (Margaret Lockwood) finds that her new elderly friend (May Whitty) has gone missing. Worse still, none of the other passengers will acknowledge having ever seen her at all! A doctor on board (Paul Lukas) suggests the missing woman might be a “vivid subjective image.” And thus we find ourselves in a groove that Hitchcock would revisit throughout his career, with a world that is suddenly marked by paranoia, suspicion, and mind games. Even as a footloose ethnomusicologist (Michael Redgrave) comes to the young lady’s aid and helps her get to the bottom of things, things which come to involve guns and poison and espionage, the film maintains its comedic aspect, setting it apart from later Hitchcock classics such as Rear Window (1954) or North by Northwest (1959). Indeed, the script from Sidney Gilliat and Frank Laudner is so light and playful that a pair of red herring potential villains turn out to be nothing more than two buddies on the way to a cricket match (Naunton Wayne, Basil Radford), who nevertheless casually participate in a shootout that doesn’t concern them before going on to have a life of their own.