The Lady Vanishes

Hitchcock and trains, Hitchcock and trains – even the words seem to run on rails. The Lady Vanishes is the British director’s take on the 1930s craze for the murder mystery on the move. And though Hitchcock could have lent on Agatha Christie’s Murder on the Orient Express – published in 1933 to instant acclaim – he was in fact working from Ethel Lina White’s The Wheel Spins, a 1936 best-seller from a fellow British writer who hasn’t weathered as well. But White has something here – the notion of gaslighting. The Wheel Spins turns on the determination of its central character to resist the dominant narrative while everyone around her, for various … Read more