 |
| Margaret
Lockwood, Michael Redgrave, Paul Lukas, Dame May Whitty, Cecil
Parker, Linden Travers, Naunton Wayne, Basil Radford |
|
 |
Anamorphic
widescreen |
|
Dolby Digital
5.1 |
|
DTS |
|
|
Trailer(s) |
|
Featurette(s) |
|
Documentary |
 |
Audio commentary
|
|
Deleted scenes
|
|
Concept art
/ storyboards |
|
Multi-angle
feature |
|
|
|
|
Iris (Margaret Lockwood):
Boris? Miss Henderson speaking. Look, someone upstairs is playing
musical chairs with an elephant. Move one of them out, will you?
I want to get some sleep.
While traveling in continental Europe,
a young woman realizes that a passenger seems to have been kidnapped
from her train, but no one believes her.
 The
last film Hitchcock made in England before he fled the impending
war and moved to Hollywood, remains one of his freshest, funniest
and most uncomplicatedly entertaining films. Cleverly conceived
by the director as a change of pace from the more straightforward
thrillers for which he'd become known, The Lady Vanishes
is more of an ensemble piece than his other best-known features.
The large supporting cast, including the career-making turns from
comic duo Naunton Wayne and Basil Radford as cricket-obsessed archetypal
Englishmen, gets as least as many memorable moments as the strongly
played romantic leads. Hitchcock revisited many of the film's themes
and ideas in his later, more richly developed Hollywood pictures.
But rarely did he truly recapture the efficient, energetic pace
and uncluttered style of this early classic. |
|
 |
 |
|
|
There are several cheap movie-only
DVD releases available both for Region 1 and Region 2, but the version
with the best transfer and the best supplements is easily the Criterion
Collection release, encoded for Region1. It is available separately
or as part of the five-disc Hitchcock box set 'Wrong Men, Notorious
Women'. The Criterion release served as the basis for this review.
The fullscreen image is framed
at its original aspect ratio of approx. 1.33:1. The source print
has been impressively restored, with most instances of dirt, debris
and scratches skillfully removed. Blacks are deep and solid, and
grain is at an absolute minimum (apart from the opening credits,
which are both grainy and jittery).
The mono sound mix is rendered in Dolby Digital 1.0, sounding clear
and mostly free of hiss or crackle.
This is one of the first DVD releases
in the Criterion Collection (bearing spine number 3), which
explains the lack of many extras when compared to more recent releases
of Hitchcock classics. The main supplement here is the audio
commentary track by film scholar Bruce Eder, who provides
a scholarly but fluent and hugely informative shot-by-shot analysis
of Hitchcock's storytelling techniques, richly layered with background
information on the production history and on the cast. He focuses
on the points that make this film stand out within the director's
body of work, as well as drawing comparisons to later films by establishing
regular themes and variations. It's one of the better Hitchcock
commentary tracks out there, and easily justifies the purchase on
its own. The only other supplement on this release is an eye-opening
restoration demonstration that shows how much dirt,
damage and debris has been removed for this release in three minutes
of freeze-frame, slow-motion and short scene comparisons. Stylishly
designed menus with minimal animation of a number of stills from
the film.
Dan
Hassler-Forest
Reviewed:
April 14, 2003
Click
here for IMDB info on The
Lady Vanishes.
Click here
to return to the front page.
|
|
| |
