Like Strangers on a Train, The Lady Vanishes is a most enjoyable, rollicking, light thriller full of humour and suspense. The film was made in England in 1936 and set Hitchcock on the path to real fame as a director.

The Lady Vanishes is not one of Hitchcock's deeper films but has the advantage of the two central characters, Michael Redgrave and Margaret Lockwood, giving superb, elevating performances.

Almost the entire action takes place in a train traveling from Switzerland to England, just before the war with German and British spies and counterspies at work. Dame May Whitty plays Miss Froy, the lady who vanishes, with such superb characterization that everyone must want to own her as their favourite great aunt.

All the characters on the train are superbly sketched but the most memorable duo are the cricket-mad Englishmen, Chalmers and Caldicott played by Basil Rathbone and Naunton Wayne for whom the only objective in life, despite the gathering signs of World War II, is to get back in time for the Test Match.

The Lady Vanishes, is a precursor of films like To Catch a Thief and North by North West, that are replete with tension, suspense and humour. In these films, Hitchcock sets out purely to entertain but not to make a personal statement and he achieves his objective by superb, taut-editing and brilliant camera work.