The Lady Vanishes (The Criterion Collection) [Blu-ray]

A Perfect Lady
This 1937 comic thriller is one of the first great masterpieces of Alfred Hitchcock. Based on Ethel Lina White's novel, THE WHEEL SPINS, it mixes laughs and chills better than just about any other film, before or since. A nervous bride-to-be (beautiful Margaret Lockwood) meets a sweet elderly woman (the magnificent Dame May Whitty) on a train bound through Europe to London just before WWII. Also aboard: a roguish musicologist (Michael Redgrave), a pair of adulterers (Cecil Parker and Linden Travers), a smooth German doctor (Paul Lukas), two delightfully fussy cricket fans (Basil Radford and Naunton Wayne), and a mysterious nun (Catherine Lacy) wearing sexy high heels under her habit. When the old lady disappears from the moving train, the young heroine investigates, and everyone else aboard insists that she is mistaken--there never was any old lady....

I can think of no higher tribute to Hitchcock than the fact that so many recent hit films are virtual remakes of his...

Budget Release Meets/Exceeds Expectations
First the usual warnings: caveat emptor, you get what you pay for, etc. etc. etc., yadda yadda yadda, blah blah blah. With that out of the way, let me say that getting these three early Hitchcock films at such a low price is an extremely good deal. Sure they're blurry in parts and there are occasional picture/sound glitches, but nothing really interferes with either the storytelling or the suspense, which is really why you're watching them in the first place.

Let me add that the four-star rating is for the DVD as a whole. None of the films are presented at four-star quality (The Lady Vanishes is maybe three-and-a-half), but the fact that you get three movies instead of one or two bumps the score from average to slightly-above.

The Man Who Knew Too Much is the oldest of the three movies and its print and sound quality are the most deteriorated. Nevertheless, the symphony scene and the final gunfight retain their suspensefulness. The movie holds its own against...

A Cinematic Masterpiece
There's one thing that movies can do better than any other artistic medium. It's having you experience something from a character's point of view, and then having every other character in the movie say it never happened. Your empathy as a viewer is at its highest pitch: you saw what happened with your own eyes, and so you see it through the character's eyes as well, but then everyone denies it. This is the central scene on the train in THE LADY VANISHES. Nothing, absolutely nothing, in my opinion, is more cinematic than this. When the idea is used to trick the viewer (as in THE USUAL SUSPECTS), it's not as good (although still it's pretty good, because again it uses film in the most empathetic way possible). And when the trickery is fair--as in THE SIXTH SENSE--it can be superb. I rank THE LADY VANISHES right up there with VERTIGO, PSYCHO, and REAR WINDOW, as Hitchcock's greatest gifts to us, the moviegoers of the world. I would even add SHADOW OF A DOUBT to this...

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