The Lady Vanishes (1979, Elliott Gould, Cybill Shepherd, Angela Lansbury, Herbert Lom, Arthur Lowe, Ian Carmichael) – Classic Movie Review 9614

Wit, suspense and fun also vanish in director Anthony Page’s appalling 1979 remake of the 1938 Alfred Hitchcock classic The Lady Vanishes, with a very bad performance from miscast American star Cybill Shepherd, as a travelling heiress called Amanda Metcalfe Madvani von Hoffstetter Kelly, and an uncomfortable one from Elliott Gould as a photographer named Robert Condon, fellow passengers on a train fleeing the Nazi threat in August 1939.

Even the redoubtable Angela Lansbury isn’t at home as English nanny Miss Froy, the vanishing lady on the trans-Europe train, though Arthur Lowe and Ian Carmichael just about make an amusing team as the mad-keen cricketing duo Charters and Caldicott.

The previous year other hands had made a successful version of Hitchcock’s The 39 Steps and writer George Axelrod stays fairly close to Frank Launder and Sidney Gilliat’s Thirties screenplay, so (apart from casting Americans) what went wrong? Maybe Axelrod should have started with adapting Ethel Lina White’s source novel The Wheel Spins instead, and thus make a fresh start.

Sadly, it was the final Hammer Films film, and how ironic that it wasn’t a horror movie.

Also in the cast are Herbert Lom, Jean Anderson, Jenny Runacre, Gerald Harper, Madlena Nedeva, Madge Knight, Vladek Sheybal, Wolf Kaher, Barbara Markham, Jonathan Hachett, Gary McDermott, Jacki Harding, Hillevi, John Alkin, Jeremy Bulloch, William Hootkins, Helen Lambert, Claus-Dieter Reents and Dan van Husen.

The Lady Vanishes is directed by Anthony Page, runs 98 minutes, is made by Hammer Films and The Rank Organisation, is released by Rank Film Distributors (1979) (UK) and Group 1 International Distribution (1980) (US), is written by George Axelrod, based on Ethel Lina White’s novel The Wheel Spins and Frank Launder and Sidney Gilliat’s 1938 screenplay The Lady Vanishes, is shot by Douglas Slocombe, is produced by Michael Carreras and Tom Sachs, is scored by Richard Hartley and Les Reed, and is designed by Wilfred Shingleton.

It was remade for British TV as the 2013 film The Lady Vanishes, starring Tuppence Middleton, and there is a 2018 stage play version, The Lady Vanishes written by Derek Webb

The Wheel Spins novel was originally published in 1936 Collins Crime Club, London. The mad-keen cricketing duo Charters and Caldicott do not appear.

Ethel Lina White’s 1942 novel Midnight House became the 1945 film The Unseen, directed by Lewis Allen. Her 1933 novel Some Must Watch was filmed in 1946 as The Spiral Staircase, was remade as The Spiral Staircase in 1975, and again for TV in 2000.

© Derek Winnert 2020 Classic Movie Review 9614

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The first edition of The Wheel Spins, Collins Crime Club, London, 1936.