CAHUN YOUR ENTHUSIASM (7)
By:
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 has become a powder-keg. And then a fuse is lit! The lady, Miss Froy (May Whitty), vanishes from a train racing through a fictional Eastern European nation. The train represents the Normal Course of Events (cf. Marx’s “the locomotives of history”); its English passengers are isolationist, self-protective. 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. 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 that Paul Dano might have cast in every Harrison Ford role) fight with Signor Doppo, train-specific heroics performed by Gilbert, a gunfight in which the English passengers demonstrate their true colors, and Catherine Lacey’s turn as a deaf-mute nun in heels. Nor, alas, will I dwell upon Basil Radford and Naunton Wayne’s debut as the recurring duo Charters and Caldicott.
We aren’t impressed with Iris, a wealthy playgirl who claims to have “been everywhere and done everything.” The way she treats the hotel staff, and Gilbert, an 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 offering Iris kindly 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 uttered by Gilbert.) However, Iris’s girlboss 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. “There is no reason to be afraid,” Hartz counsels, “if you are quiet and relaxed.” This stuff is a perfect illustration of T.W. Adorno’s warning, written during the war, that a psychological focus on one’s individual adaptation to a flawed society will cause one to lose one’s critical faculties. So… will Iris adapt, or will she heroically choose a life of alienation?
“Stop the train!” she cries, to all of us, before yanking on the train’s emergency brake cord. “Why don’t you do something before it’s too late?”
CAHUN YOUR ENTHUSIASM: INTRODUCTION by Josh Glenn | Mark Kingwell on ONCE UPON A HONEYMOON | Lynn Peril on ZAZOUS | Judith Zissman on DIE GEDANKEN SIND FREI | Annie Nocenti on MEDIUM COOL | Mike Watt on FASCIST | William Nericcio on LALO ALCARAZ | Josh Glenn on THE LADY VANISHES | Carlo Rotella on INQUIETUD | Heather Quinlan on CASABLANCA | Adam McGovern on HEART OF GLASS (Mad Jenny) | Matthew Battles on WOODY’S GUITAR | Carl Wilson on PALACES OF GOLD | Ramona Lyons on UPRIGHT WOMEN WANTED | Lucy Sante on CAMOUFLAGE | Adelina Vaca on AKIRA | Tom Nealon on THE BARON IN THE TREES | Nikhil Singh on PARIS PEASANT | Mandy Keifetz on THE REVOLUTION WILL NOT BE TELEVISED | Gordon Dahlquist on THE CONFORMIST | Alex Brook Lynn on WHY WE FIGHT | Gabriela Pedranti on THE ETERNAUT | Heather Kapplow on ANTI-FASCIST PASTA | Marc Weidenbaum on (WHAT’S SO FUNNY ’BOUT) PEACE, LOVE, AND UNDERSTANDING | Peggy Nelson on PUPPETS | Sonia Marques on CARNATIONS AGITPROP.
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