She takes an unaccompanied holiday via train to the fictional European country of Bandrika. She is befriended by the elderly and kindly Miss Froy (Dame May Whitty). But when Iris wakes from a nap, Miss Froy appears to have vanished from the train. An increasingly frantic Iris tries to locate her, but all she meets say they never saw her.
The only one willing to help Iris is Gilbert (Michael Redgrave), a cocky Brit who understandably takes a fancy to her. In their search for Miss Froy, they are accompanied by noted brain surgeon Dr. Hartz (Paul Lukas), a German and therefore suspect despite his noble demeanor.
There's no shortage of suspicious and creepy foreigners. There are also a few fellow Brits. These include Caldicott and Charters (respectively Naunton Wayne and Basil Radford), two comical cricket-obsessed blokes who eventually rise above their petty behavior to emerge as heroes. There's also lawyer Cecil Parker, who has brought along his mistress, Linden Travers. Parker is a stuffed shirt so dislikable, and so pacifist in a Neville Chamberlin sort of way, that we're almost glad to see him shot later on.
At first, Gilbert is merely humoring Iris, in order to bask in her hottie feminine company. Once he learns that there really is a big conspiracy afoot, he changes from a condescending bird dog into an unabashed British hero, willing to tangle with the villains in their own country with his own life at risk.
How others will see it. The Lady Vanishes was an instant classic. The British public loved the film, and especially the comic duo of Wayne and Radford, who repeated their roles in an additional dozen or so films. Americans were also impressed, and it was only a couple years later that director Hitchcock crossed the Atlantic and began plying his formidable talents in Hollywood.
Today, more than 70 years after it was made, The Lady Vanishes remains highly respected. At the time of writing, it is in the imdb.com Top 250 at #197. It is entertaining, and no one minded then or now that it borrows several elements from earlier Hitchcock successes, particularly the notion that a nest of creepy foreign spies are no match for a dashing Englishman, even if he is an amateur.
How I felt about it. Entertainment isn't everything. It helps if the story is plausible. Therein lies the problem for The Lady Vanishes. For example, a man is pointing a gun at Iris. But the next time we see her, the gunman is gone, and she is secure in the arms of Gilbert, predictably in time for the happy ending. What happened to the gunman?
I find it remarkable that Gilbert happens to be idly staring at a window the moment that tossed trash clings to its outside, clearly revealing the label of a packet of tea, which of course means that Iris has been right all along. It is almost as if God himself put his finger against the label to hold it up for Gilbert to see. If so, God had plenty to do on the train, since who else could make the faux nun (Catherine Lacy) switch sides to the extent that she risks her life switching the train tracks?
We won't even mention the unusual coincidence that the heroine who tries to locate Miss Froy just happens to be a one in three hundred beauty. And while searching for and rescuing her, she just happens to meet and fall in love with her future husband. No wonder Hitchcock is famous for his quotation, "For me, the cinema is not a slice of life, but a piece of cake."
Some have studied The Lady Vanishes from a political perspective. Did Hitchcock foresee that Great Britain would soon be at war with Germany, and if so, is the film an allegory that the nation should take up arms against sinister evildoers? Or is it just storytelling in the form of self-congratulatory British patriotism? My belief is that it is the latter. Hitchock used politics as a motive within his films. He did not make films to advocate his politics.