BEFORE: Hey, great news, I'm finally getting to some Alfred Hitchcock films that I've heard about! Linking from "The Girl Was Young", two actors carry over, Basil Radford and Mary Clare. As does Hitchcock himself, who makes a cameo in a railway station in this one.
THE PLOT: While traveling in continental Europe, a rich young playgirl realizes that an elderly lady seems to have disappeared from the train.
AFTER: There's a comparatively long set-up on this one, unlike "Murder!", where the murder happened quite early in the film, and the same goes for "Sabotage". This must have driven audiences crazy back in the day, wondering when the lady in question was indeed going to vanish. But the set-up serves an important purpose, introducing us to all of the various characters who are staying at a crowded European hotel while waiting for the train tracks to be cleared after an avalanche.
Their lives are so mundane, so normal - the bickering couple, the two men obsessed with cricket (who don't seem to mind the fact that they have to share a bed...hmmm...) - but this also serves a purpose once the aforementioned vanishing takes place. Surely there must be some kind of conspiracy taking place, but if that's the case, which of these terribly normal people are in on it, and therefore not really who they claim to be?
Adding to the confusion is the fact that our lead actress gets a box dropped on her head, just before boarding the train, which causes double-vision and some blurriness as well. Is it possible that the knock on the head caused her to imagine her conversation with the old lady? Or are we looking at some sort of Tyler Durden-type situation, where she was never real to begin with?
From everything I can tell, this was Hitchcock's first real attempt at shocking the audience - presenting a situation to the audience that is seemingly impossible, which just CAN'T be true. Up until this point, his films have focused on simple murders, blackmail, false accusations - all very real, possible situations. Even a package that's secretly a bomb, that's a situation that's all too real.
It's alleged that Hitchcock based this plot on a real-life situation, in which a woman was sick at a Paris hotel during the Great Exposition in the 1880's. She sent her daughter across town to fetch some medicine, a trip which took several hours, and then died during the interim. The woman had been ill with bubonic plague, and the hotel employees did not want to cause a panic, which would have ruined their business and even potentially emptied the whole city - so when the daughter returned, the entire staff pretended to have never seen the woman, and even redecorated the room to make the daughter's story appear to be nonsensical.
All that aside, Hitchcock had some nerve, looking 70 years into the future, accurately predicting and then stealing the plot of the 2005 Jodie Foster film "Flightplan". I'm not quite sure how he did that, but perhaps he was just that good.
It's still a long way to go for a little pay-off, if you ask me, but at least it's all well executed.
Also starring Margaret Lockwood, Michael Redgrave (last seen in "Goodbye, Mr. Chips"), Paul Lukas, Dame May Whitty, Cecil Parker (last seen in "The Ladykillers"), Naunton Wayne, Linden Travers.
RATING: 6 out of 10 white doves
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