silver nitrate notes

The Lady Vanishes and the Compartment That Forgot

5 may 2014

Alfred Hitchcock directed The Lady Vanishes (1938) at Gaumont-British in his last year of British production before his move to Hollywood. The cinematographer was Jack Cox, a regular Hitchcock collaborator. The film is set almost entirely on a continental train returning from a fictional Balkan country to England, a format that Hitchcock would revisit at intervals for the rest of his career.

The premise. Iris (Margaret Lockwood), a young Englishwoman returning home, makes the acquaintance of Miss Froy (Dame May Whitty), an elderly governess, in a mountain hotel and on the train that follows. Iris falls asleep. When she wakes, Miss Froy has disappeared. Every other passenger on the train denies Miss Froy ever existed. Iris, with the help of an initially sceptical musicologist (Michael Redgrave), must establish what has happened.

Cox's photography is studio work. Hitchcock shot the entire train on a sound stage at Islington Studios in London, using a real train carriage mounted on rockers for motion and rear-projection plates of passing landscape outside the windows. What Cox does with the compartment sequences is motivate all the light from the train's interior fixtures (overhead fluorescents, reading lamps) so that the sense of enclosure in a moving vehicle is visual, not verbal. When Iris walks the length of the train looking for Miss Froy, each compartment is lit differently. Cox and Hitchcock establish the geography of the train by lighting.

The MacGuffin is a coded message that Miss Froy has memorised as a musical phrase. Hitchcock, by this point in his career, was publicly talking about what he called the MacGuffin, the thing the characters care about that the audience does not need to. The Lady Vanishes is one of the clearest examples of the technique. The actual content of the message is irrelevant. What matters is Iris's attempt to believe her own memory against the pressure of a train full of strangers telling her she is wrong.

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sources
[1] Truffaut, François. Hitchcock/Truffaut. Simon & Schuster, rev. ed. 1983.
[2] Barr, Charles. English Hitchcock. Cameron & Hollis, 1999.
[3] McGilligan, Patrick. Alfred Hitchcock: A Life in Darkness and Light. Regan, 2003.
[4] White, Ethel Lina. The Wheel Spins. Collins, 1936 (source novel).