The Lady Vanishes

My God this was so awful, I barely know where to start!..This was a period piece, and yet some of the dialogue was pure 21st century 'smart-speak'. People did not feel 'empathy' in pre-war Britain (and would certainly never had admitted feeling such to strangers if they had). The scriptwriters seem to have forgotten the separate meanings and contextual uses of 'will' and 'shall', and the accents were Estuarine in the extreme. There was far too much breathless 'gushing' by our heroine (who ever thought to cast Middleton in this role anyway?.. She hasn't the screen presence nor the ability to convey any sort of emotion other than a rather hollow & supercilious haughtiness), and Tom Hughes (Max Hare) simply carried on where he left off in 'Dancing on the Edge'...The only characters with any sort of screen credulity were the Reverend and his wife, and even they had to be given a paper-thin sideplot to flesh out their presence...Rhind-Tutt was completely wasted, and even Stephanie Cole's attempts at caustic wit were cheap and shallow...Where was the menacing threat of Hitchcock's original?..The whole thing reeked of hurried, seedy amateurism...I thought the 1979 remake with Gould and Shepherd was bad, but even that production had some saving graces (remember Arthur Lowe & Ian Carmichael as the two cricket-mad Englishmen). The main question is why bother making it at all?.. A shabby remake, poorly thrown together, with a second-no, make that a third-rate cast.

Sunday night is not the time for invention or challenge or innovation, it is a time for unwinding, for enjoying the last few hours of not working before you have to return to Monday and not relaxing. As such it is the home of things like Marple, Midsummer Night Murders and other shows which provide drama but dress it up with comfortable, non-threatening color and light entertainment. This is what brings us a new version of The Lady Vanishes. It is quite a move to step up to a story that Hitchcock has already told in a manner that has stood as the version since it was made, but in reality this version is happy to focus on fitting the timeslot rather than doing something with the story.

It tells you all you need to know when the things that appear to have been worked on the hardest are the sets and the costumes – very BBC Sunday night, lots of good period costumes and everything has good quality in that regard. It has that proper English feel throughout but the problem is that it doesn't really know what it wants to be other than a rather safe, warm Sunday night slice of easy. I was looking for something in the way of humor, or maybe tension or perhaps even a playful mix of the two, but nothing of the sort ever came. The result is a rather bland and safe TV movie that offers nothing of note but presents it in a very warm and professional way with lots of nice but unmemorable people in it.

Unfortunately the least of these people is Middleton, who is in the lead role. She fails at being distressed, she fails at being playfully sexy and generally she distinguishes herself by how little of an impression she makes. The rest of the cast do little else – the Baroness and those around her are too much pantomime but without the fun and nothing ever really sparks as it should. The chemistry between Middleton and Hughes is not there at all – each do their own version of flirty but it doesn't meet in the middle.

It isn't a terrible film by any means – it does what it does and knows what its target audience wants at the time it was screened. It I hard to avoid how very bland it is – no real lows I guess, but certainly no highs or anything to recommend it for. I worried that it would fall short of the Hitchcock film of the same name – I needn't have though, because it doesn't even really try to get close. Watch it for the warm colors and nice costumes, but there isn't much else here.

For comparison, I have always hankered after another, more faithful adaptation of Strangers on a Train. The Highsmith original is on a completely different psychological plane to Hitchcock's superb adaptation, which plays with the banality of evil theme but adds ticking, suspenseful timebombs and a hero who may have moments of weakness but triumphs in the end.

The 2013 version of The Lady Vanishes will have to do instead. It is NOT a remake nor a version of nor even based on the Hitchcock film. Far from it. Bemoaning the absence of Charters and Caldicott misses the point entirely. This film is a much straighter adaptation of Hitchcock's original source material, The Wheel Spins by Ethel Lina White.

Even if this new production were rubbish, as a close adaptation of the original source, it would still offer worthwhile study by providing an illustration of how much craft the master added to create one of the best films of the 1930's. Let's face it, no one has read the novel. Hitch turns an essay in nervousness about more trouble in the Balkans into an appeasement era allegory of the difficulty of shaking people out of an apathetic response to tyranny and the virtues of resistance, all dressed in beautifully tailored cinematic clothes that will last forever.

Diarmuid Lawrence's The Lady Vanishes, however, is very far from rubbish. It has a powerful, beautifully judged central performance from an actress who, unlike Cybill Shepherd in what WAS a remake in 1979, is in the same class as Margaret Lockwood.

In the initial scenes she is part of a group of what the newspapers called Bright Young Things but Evelyn Waugh called Vile Bodies. She is able to stand out from her awful, shallow friends, however, with suggestions of an open mind and a wider view of the world. Without falling into clichés, Middleton distances herself in an afternoon and evening of misbehaviour then separates herself entirely by staying behind when her friends leave.

This turns out to be an empty gesture. After a failed attempt at adventure, she immediately returns to type missing her friends, refusing offers of company, throwing money around at the locals and falling back into the character of a rude, spoilt mademoiselle, shorn of her comforts.

This sets up the irony of her behaviour on the train when she finally discovers what it is that is truly different about her. However now, for a variety of reasons, people who can see the difference can't acknowledge it and people who can't see the difference misinterpret her. The only person who has understood her correctly has vanished. Lawrence's version holds on to this subtle psychological setup much longer than Hitchcock's. Those who think she's hysterical plot to sedate her. Those who know she isn't, hide themselves.

Middleton's work is a real treat. The rest of the cast may not have enough to work with (one of the reasons why Hitchcock conducted a major rewrite). And instead of a graceful denouement, the action does rather hit the buffers at the end of the line. Very nice lwork in the last scene, though, more reminiscent of North by North West.

However, despite a few shortcomings, this is a neat piece of period drama in its own right and casts a bright and valuable sidelight on Hitchcock's work as an adapter.

No one should put off by misguided criticism that it fails to live up to Lockwood and Redgrave. Unlike the 1979 rehash, it has earned its place on the shelf next to the Hitchcock version of the same novel.

By calling this PBS program "The Lady Vanishes," one believes he or she will see a remake of the Hitchcock film of the same name.

However, that's not the case. Alfred Hitchcock was notorious for purchasing a book to make a film and then using a section or even a paragraph from it and building the story around it.

Hitchcock's source material was a novel called "The Wheel Spins" by Ethel Linna White, and this is an adaptation of that, which only bears a passing resemblance to "The Lady Vanishes." An elderly British woman who befriends a younger woman seems to disappear from a train, but no one can remember seeing her in the first place.

The young woman in this case has the same name as the early film, Iris Carr, and here she's played by Tuppence Middleton. She's a playgirl, with plenty of money and drunken friends, and they've all made a spectacle of themselves at the hotel where they stayed in Croatia. Iris becomes ill, supposedly of sunstroke, and nearly misses her train.

When she boards the train, she finds that not many people speak English, and it seems like an awful lot of the people from the hotel are on it. Still not feeling well, she is befriended by a Miss Froy who takes tea with her. Iris falls asleep, and when she wakes up, Miss Froy is gone. She seems to have disappeared off of a moving train. A handsome young man, Max Hare (Tom Hughes) befriends her and tries to help. But it starts to seem to him and to others that Ms. Carr is off her nut.

The film started slowly, and for this, I blame the leading woman and the direction she received. She comes off as extremely unpleasant and bratty, and by the time she's plowed into the twelfth person without saying 'excuse me,' your interest is just about lost. Once other characters enter into the story, it picks up.

It was great to see MI-5's Keeley Hawes, almost unrecognizable in a black wig, as a woman having a liaison with, of all people, Julian Rhind-Tutt playing a proper Englishman. In his younger days, with his unusual face he always played wild men, sporting long red hair and using his comic timing to perfection. Here, his hair is short and he is quite distinguished as a somewhat frosty Englishman.

I was a little disappointed. I wanted it to be better.

THE LADY VANISHES is the third adaptation of an old-time mystery novel. It was first made - to great success - by Hitchcock in the 1930s, and then a remake with Cybil Shepherd and Elliott Gould followed in the 1970s. This new version is a TV movie made by the BBC, and - somewhat inevitably - it's the weakest version yet.

The problem with this adaptation is a mixture of both the script and the budget. It's obviously made to cash in on the success of DOWNTON ABBEY, but there's far too much of the socialising and not enough of the thriller. The first half hour is excruciatingly slow and even once the action shifts to the train it doesn't get much better. The scenes on the train feel claustrophobic and not in a good way; Hitch's version ended with a rousing action scene, but the drawn-out mystery here just fizzles out with a lack of inspiration and budget constraints.

The cast is no better. Tuppence Middleton (TORMENTED) is the detestable heroine, and required to undergo a character arc from snobby and rude to warm and caring, but Middleton is too inexperienced to convince in the part. The likes of Keeley Hawes and Julian Rhind-Tutt are merely window dressing, their performances weak imitations of their roles in UPSTAIRS, DOWNSTAIRS and THE HOUR respectively. As for Gemma Jones and Stephanie Cole, the actresses are game but their comedy value is virtually nil. Jesper Christensen must be thinking that his days of starring in James Bond movies are long in the past with this pitiful, by-the-numbers TV drama.