The Lady Vanishes (1938)
Directed by Alfred Hitchcock
On a train headed for England a group of travelers is delayed by an avalanche. Holed up in a hotel in a fictional European country, young Iris befriends elderly Miss Froy. When the train resumes, Iris suffers a bout of unconsciousness and wakes to find the old woman has disappeared. The other passengers ominously deny Miss Froy ever existed, so Iris begins to investigate with another traveler and, as the pair sleuth, romantic sparks fly.
7 connections found
View:
7 connections, in both directions
What critics compared The Lady Vanishes to
The theme of disappearance has been attempted by many great directors (Hitchcock’s The Lady Vanishes),but it has never been done as spookily as it is here.
An art-house hit in 1988 (and re-made in the U.S. by the same director in 1993, with predictably lamentable results), the picture is a chilling reinterpolation of the plot device Hitchcock used in The Lady Vanishes (1938).
Given both archetypes, Sluizer fully embraces them in The Vanishing, and on the surface it's a conventional film with a passionate hero trying to find a lost companion (an archetype readily available from Hitchcock's The Lady Vanishes, and repeated innumerable times since.)
Working with screenwriter Patrick O'Neill, Mangold also sneaks in a party-clever visual reference to Hitchcock's The Lady Vanishes involving misted breath on a train window, and a verbal shout-out to France's legendary Hotel du Cap, where the director once held a press conference for his 1997 film Cop Land during the Cannes Film Festival.
Frantic most obviously recalls the plots of Hitchcock's The Lady Vanishes and The Man Who Knew Too Much, concerning as it does the disappearance of a woman and the scramble to find her.
Anderson names "The Lady Vanishes," "The 39 Steps," "Sabotage" and "Torn Curtain" as specific inspirations.
Like Alfred Hitchcock, whose classic “The Lady Vanishes” is a tonal and visual-effects influence, Anderson is a visionary who can make us laugh at wallpaper, drapes, leather clothing and the faces of Jeff Goldblum, ?Mathieu Almaric, Bill Murray, Saoirse Ronan, Harvey Keitel and others.
Advertisement
The title may or may not refer to Donald Rumsfeld's known unknowns and unknown unknowns, but for seasoned movie-goers this violent, fast-moving, neo-film noir is a well-known unknown in a tradition that includes Hitchcock's The Lady Vanishes , Polanski's Frantic , the Jason Bourne trilogy and any number of amnesia thrillers.
And “Knives Out” joins a prestigious canon of movie mysteries, alongside René Clair’s 1945 Christie adaptation “And Then There Were None” and excellent early Hitchcock 1938’s “The Lady Vanishes.”
Alan B. McElroy‘s script is lifting elements from The Lady Vanishes , The Shining , Shudder Island , and many more – even Anderson’s own Session 9 – resulting in an unfortunately unoriginal script.
And then “Fractured” becomes a riff on “The Lady Vanishes” (or “Flightplan” for modern audiences), in which we have to decide if Ray is crazy or if everyone at the hospital is conspiring to make him so.
A(nother) disposable Netflix thriller that fails to do anything with its potentially clever premise, Brad Anderson’s “Fractured” isn’t the first modern riff on “The Lady Vanishes” — not even close — but it’s one of the few that finds a compelling new backdrop for that Agatha Christie-esque tale of conspiracy and gaslighting.