THE LADY VANISHES - Hitchcock's Most Political Film?

Another article on Alfred Hitchcock's The Lady Vanishes has just hit the street, or, at least, the Internet. In an article in the Guardian, Matthew Sweet states: "The Lady Vanishes is one of the least analysed pictures in the Hitchcock canon; critics have always preferred to pick over the railway-bookstand Freudianism of his American films. When Eric Rohmer and Claude Chabrol wrote their pioneering study of the director, they concluded that the film "requires little commentary". The critic Geoffrey O'Brien has argued: "The Lady Vanishes is the film that best exemplifies Hitchcock's often asserted desire to offer audiences not a slice of life but a slice of cake." Watching the film again, in a bright new print struck by the British Film Institute, that seems to me to be an unsupportable position. The Lady Vanishes is the most political film that Hitchcock ever made. It is a parable about Britain during the appeasement years."

I agree with Sweet’s otherwise dismissive article on Hitchcock that The Lady Vanishes is an often overlooked masterpiece. But I can’t join him in his assertion that that the movie was "the most political film that Hitchcock ever made." That’s an ignorant statement. Foreign Correspondent (1940), for instance, is essentially a propaganda piece (made for general distribution), whereas, he also made two more bona fide propaganda pieces, Adventure Malgache and Bon Voyage (both 1944) to support the war effort in France. Sabotage (1936) might his "most political" British film. Other Hitchcock films could be cited as being deeply political.

Other observers have commented that Hitch's films are merely personal dramas that take place against a political or wartime backdrop. The implication is that the wartime setting is merely background scenery and that it has little to do with the dramatic story. I don't think that's quite accurate. I'd say that the romantic dramas in his films are inextricably (in the most profound sense of the word) linked with their political subplots. Topaz (1969) is fundamentally a "statement film" about the Cold War and its corrosive effects on the individuals who participated in it. The same goes for Torn Curtain (1966). Notorious (1946) likewise examines the effect that WWII patriotism had on the people working to avert its disastrous outcomes. The beauty of Hitch’s films is that they work so profoundly well on both the personal and the political level.

In fact, one of the primary themes of Hitch films is that there's a bit of good in the bad guys and a bit of bad in the good guys. That very theme brings the personal and political together and implies that "all is one" – personally, politically, ecumenically (to borrow from Johnny Depp). (C.f. North by Northwest and Thornhill's complaint that `maybe you should begin learning how to lose a few Cold Wars' – a political conclusion based on Thornhill's personal experience.)

What was Hitchcock's Greatest British Film?

To accompany the recent Criterion Collection release of The Lady Vanishes, there has been a flurry of journalism over what turned out to be Alfred Hitchcock's last British movie. In a Slate article titled "The Lady Vanishes — Hitchcock’s First Hitchcock Film," Nathaniel Rich asserted that it's Hitch’s best British film. It is, indeed, superb moviemaking. A perfect film that works as cream-puff entertainment (if that's all you want) but which is also stuffed much deeper insights — a balance of which Hitch was master. (The shooting of Todhunter, mentioned in the Slate article, is one of my favorite moments in the movie: Hitch makes us laugh at another's misfortune — and then wipes the grin right off of our face.)

Rich cites such virtues as its immaculate timing, delicacy, and danger as evidence for its greatness. Absolutely. The Lady Vanishes is also, possibly, the slickest of his British films. But these are mostly professional considerations, pointing to his accomplishment at mastering the craft of film. Technique is important, but sometimes skillfulness can actually distract from an art form’s artfulness.

I prefer works that go for broke and hence might have a rough texture. They're the ones that thumb their nose at conventions and morals (and often the box office), because the artists behind them have stepped through the veil of accepted paradigm to see something that no one else sees. Case in point: Vertigo, Hitch's most sublime film. Yet, for all of its layers of depth and brilliant craftsmanship, some of the dialogue and the situations don't hold up too well. Such is the nature of fevered audacity. You have to be a little crazy to make bold artistic moves, and that hint of insanity becomes part of the fabric of the finished product. Based on that criteria, I don’t think The Lady Vanishes was his "best" movie — and it certainly wasn’t the first "Hitchcock" film – that is, it didn’t, delve, as Rich states, "more deeply than ever before into the anxieties and secret terrors of prewar English society."Although it’s a tough call, I think the honor of Best Film from Hitch’s British Period goes to Sabotage.

Sabotage was originally released as The Woman Alone in the United States.

Sabotage is just about the most disturbing movie he made until Psycho years later. (It’s the one in which he bombs young Stevie and his dog to death.) It's also passionately at work on many levels, many of them groundbreaking. Unlike The Lady Vanishes, Sabotage isn't for everybody. It's coarse, even sadistic. But I think that's one of its virtues. It deals with the acts of political sabotage (what we would now call terrorism) that were then being wreaked upon England during Britain’s "appeasement" years prior to World War II. It delves very deeply — and with urgency — into "the anxieties and secret terrors of prewar English society."

Stevie on the bus just before he and the puppy on the seat next to him are blown to pieces.

With its death of Stevie and its ambivalent characterization of terrorists, Sabotage reminds me of Hitch's comments about another controversial masterpiece, Rear Window, in which he stated that "no amount of moral consideration could have prevented me from making this." It's a movie that is as relevant in the post-9/11 world as it was in 1936.

If we were to take a vote, I'd say that Sabotage is his greatest British film.