The Lady Vanishes

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.

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.

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.

Based on the 1938 Hitchcock thriller of the same name (which I haven't seen), this looked like rather a good whodunnit. The cast if full of young up-comers and old stalwarts, many of whom seem to be doing the rounds in British TV at the moment.

The premise: a beautiful young socialite, Iris Carr, is making her way back to England by train after a Balkans holiday and finds herself befriended by a kind older lady who calls herself Mrs Froy. Disorientated by a fall at the station earlier, Iris drifts off to sleep, only to find on awakening that Mrs Froy has disappeared and nobody else seems to have seen her - in fact they don't believe she existed in the first place. Of course there are only two possible outcomes: the woman isn't real and Iris is barking mad, or she has genuinely disappeared and there's some sort of conspiracy going on.

Unfortunately the final hour dedicated to resolving the mystery is slow-paced, boring and ultimately all a bit predictable. Apart from Sandy McDade and Tuppence Middleton, all the other characters are stereotypes who get to do very little with their screen time. Middleton is superb, tackling Iris's transition from petulant snobbery to concern and brave determination with aplomb, but the plodding script can't keep up with her enthusiasm. It's definitely a Sunday afternoon movie, and one you can watch with Grandma - just don't expect edge-of-your-seat thrills.

I find myself to be utterly annoyed with reviewers who compare this excellent BBC adaptation with Alfred Hitchcock's 1938 masterpiece. This version is a faithful adaptation of Ethel Lena White's psychological mystery novel, The Wheel Spins; Hitchcock used only the premise of the novel and added his own brilliant (often comedic) touches to make the story cinematically appealing for contemporary movie audiences. This approach is similar to what Hitchcock did in many of his other adaptations, including Rebecca and Suspicion, in which he changed the ending of the story or altered the presentation due to such considerations as audiences unwilling to accept stars like Laurence Olivier and Cary Grant being guilty of murder.

As for this 2013 version of The Lady Vanishes, directed by Diarmuid Lawrence, it is a straight drama, like the original novel. Although many contemporary readers may have overlooked the novel, I highly recommend it, as I do this adaptation.