CAHUN YOUR ENTHUSIASM (7)

By: Joshua Glenn
January 24, 2026

One in a series of enthusiastic posts, contributed by 25 HILOBROW friends and regulars, analyzing and celebrating our favorite… anti-fascist art! Series edited by Josh Glenn.

THE LADY VANISHES

During the first twenty-six minutes of Hitchcock’s thriller-comedy The Lady Vanishes, a film released eleven months before England would declare war on Nazi Germany, we are given to understand that Europe is on the brink of disaster. And then the titular lady, a kindly Miss Froy (May Whitty), vanishes from a train racing through a dictator-led Eastern European nation. The train represents the Normal Course of Events (cf. Marx’s “the locomotives of history”); its English passengers are self-protective, ignorant, smug. During the following twenty-six minutes, they’ll all conspire, wittingly or unwittingly, to gaslight Iris Henderson (Margaret Lockwood), the only person concerned about Miss Froy’s fate. Will or won’t Iris attempt to stop the train?

Iris’s apotheosis, which happens just after the fifty-two minute mark, is the moral climax of the movie. Thus I won’t be discussing some of my favorite later scenes, which include: Iris’s and Gilbert Redman’s (Michael Redgrave, whose performance makes one wish, anachronistically, that Paul Dano might have been cast in every Harrison Ford role) fight with Signor Doppo; and a gunfight in which the English passengers, for better or worse, demonstrate their true colors. Nor will I dwell on Basil Radford and Naunton Wayne’s perfect debut as the recurring comedic duo Charters and Caldicott.

At first we aren’t impressed with Iris, a wealthy playgirl who claims to have “been everywhere and done everything.” (We’ll see about that!) The way she treats the hotel staff, and Gilbert, a raffish ethnomusicologist, is callous. When Miss Froy says to her, supposedly about Gilbert’s tootling, “Some people show so little consideration for others,” we understand that she’s gently offering Iris some advice. (The movie’s script, by Sidney Gilliat and Frank Launder, from Ethel Lina White’s The Wheel Spins, is replete with such dry aperçus, mostly muttered by Gilbert.) However, Iris’s determination to get her own way is what fuels her search for Miss Froy…

… Until she encounters Dr. Hartz (Paul Lukas), a brain surgeon whose soothing, reasonable efforts to persuade her that “There is no ‘Miss Froy’ — there never was a ‘Miss Froy'” eventually succeed. This sinister business is a prescient illustration of T.W. Adorno’s warning, written later during the war, that a psychological focus on the individual’s adaptation to a flawed society, no matter how well-intended, will cause us to lose our critical faculties and normalize social injustice. The only true sanity, per Adorno, is a “critical pessimism” that refuses to find comfort in the status quo. So will Iris choose a life of “unhealthy” resistance… or will she adapt?

“Stop the train!” Iris cries, to her fellow passengers, and to us, before tearing herself free from Hartz and other gaslighters, and yanking on the train’s emergency brake cord. “Why don’t you do something before it’s too late?”

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MORE ENTHUSIASM at HILOBROW

CAHUN YOUR ENTHUSIASM (7)

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