"The Lady Vanishes (1938)"
A.H. "When the reviews labelled it a Hitchcock picture, Launder
and Gilliat decided forthwith to undertake their own producing and
directing. Have you seen any of their pictures?"
F.T. "There was one, Green for Danger, that didn’t quite
come off, and I see a Dark Stranger, that was more interesting. But
the best one of all wasn’t a thriller, it was The Rake’s
Progress with Rex Harrison."
From Hitchcock by Francois Truffaut, Simon and Schuster, 1985.
It’s a shame the conversation ends there, since it would be
fascinating to get Hitchcock’s own opinion on his one-time collaborators’
work. Various screenwriters who worked with Hitch later tried their
hands at writing “Hitchcockian” thrillers without the
master, (one thinks of The Prize, scripted by Ernest Lehman of North
by Northwest fame) but none succeeded as well or as often and Frank
Launder and Sidney Gilliat. And to this success we must add their
many popular comedies, which are as much-loved in their native Britain
as they are unknown outside it.
The story doesn’t end well: Gilliat’s last credit is
for originating the story of The Boys in Blue (1982), a film of legendary
low quality which ended the long career of fellow movie maestro Val
Guest, while Launder bowed out with The Wildcats of St. Trinian’s
in 1980. Conversational use of the word “charmless” increases
tenfold whenever that one gets an airing. But the preceding films
are always very much charming, as well as stylistically daring in
a way that is rarely acknowledged.
As for Hitchcock’s account, we must take it with a pinch of
salt, as with many of the great man’s pronouncements: Launder
and Gilliat did not start to direct and produce until the early forties,
several years after the success of The Lady Vanishes, and Gilliat
even worked for Hitchcock again, contributing dialogue to Jamaica
Inn, released in 1939, a full year after the lady had vanished.
Prior to their Hitchcock hit, both men had been writing for the movies
since the first coming of sound, on mostly minor British comedies
and musicals whose scenarios were typically cobbled together by whole
gangs of ink-stained wretches. Those were the days when, as Preston
Sturges ruefully observed, “Writers were expected to work in
teams, like piano movers.” 1933 saw the pair briefly united
in writing a Stanley Lupino piece of fluff called Facing the Music,
though it’s uncertain the writers even met, and it was not until
1936 that the two were a bona fide writing partnership, quickly churning
out efficient thrillers leavened with their trademark wit.
The film for which they are best known internationally, The Lady
Vanishes, is a perfect marriage of Launder, Gilliat and Hitchcock.
Originally lined up for American Roy William Neill to direct, the
project foundered and was picked up by Hitch some years later. The
material was the perfect blend of comedy and suspense, and after he
had induced Launder and Gilliat to pace up the opening and add more
twists and excitement to the ending, Hitchcock was able to make of
it an instant classic, the first of his films to be publicised with
his name above the title on the marquee of the Empire, Leicester Square.
A great part of the film’s charm, asides from its appealing
leads, plucky Margaret Lockwood and eccentric Michael Redgrave, is
the way it musters its supporting players, a disparate group of Brits
stuck on a train bound for intrigue. A wide cross-section of British
middle-class life is here, from an adulterous M.P. (Launder and Gilliat
were known at the time for their left-wing sympathies) to the bumbling
Charters and Caldicott (Basil Radford and Naunton Wayne), who were
so popular that they were revived in a succession of films, first
by Launder and Gilliat, then by other hands. Embodying the querulous,
slightly xenophobic stereotype of the Englishman Abroad, C & C
spend the whole movie worrying more about the test match results than
about the international espionage going on all around them.
The Lady Vanishes raised its writers’ industry
profile to a higher level, and they would go on to write a quasi-sequel
for Carol Reed, Night Train to Munich (1940), after Hitchcock took
the boat to America. The loveable duffers Charters and Caldicott,
the loveably foolish Englishmen abroad played by Basil Radford and
Naunton Wayne, would reappear in this film and later in Millions Like
Us, L&G’s first feature as directors, and the only time
they officially shared the directing credit until The Great St. Trinian’s
Train Robbery in 1966 (the last of the canonical St. Trinian’s
films). The rest of the time they supported each other by providing
writing or producing or second unit directing services on each others’
directorial efforts, as well as producing several films for other
directors, all of which have a recognisable L&G tone (for example
the lightweight but appealing The Smallest Show on Earth, 1957).
That first directorial collaboration is an amazing time-capsule of
life in wartime Britain. Starring the sweet Patricia Roc and a host
of luminaries including Eric Portman, Megs Jenkins, and a foetal Gordon
Jackson, as well as “millions like you”, the film eschews
narrative rigour in favour of touching lightly upon a series of vignettes
of life on the home front, loosely held together by a core family
of central characters. The propaganda element is kept well in check,
with light joshing of the characters who fail to show the appropriate
Dunkirk spirit. Like most of the best British war films, it’s
more concerned with celebrating the virtues and quirks of the British
character than with demonizing the enemy.
Patricia Roc is very sweet as the innocent young heroine, with her
Stan Laurel delivery. Hugely popular at the time, she’s a natural
person rather than a performer, but she adds an unaffected simplicity
to the cast of quality thespians. Launder would later observe that
finding British actors at the time who could be completely natural
on screen was almost impossible, but Roc’s untutored approach
is highly effective in this role.
But of more interest to admirers of British screen acting are Eric
Portman (gruff) and Megs Jenkins (philosophical), and there’s
a scene-stealing cameo by the irrepressible Irene Handl as a landlady.
The scenes with the factory girls introduce Launder’s interest
in all-female environments, which continued through the St. Trinian’s
comedies and Two Thousand Women (1944), set in an internment camp
in occupied France.
Broadly speaking, Launder leaned towards comedy, while Gilliat was
inclined to tackle the thrillers and dramas. One might also argue
that Gilliat was the more experimental, Launder the more conservative
of the pair. But Gilliat also made straight comedies like The Constant
Husband (1955) and there are eccentric and bravura touches in many
Launder films too, reminiscent of Powell and Pressburger’s sense
of the fantastic, the absurd, and the just-plain-odd. The wild, expressionistic
dream sequence in Launder’s stunning I See a Dark Stranger (1946)
comes out of left field, like an out-take from Dead of Night (1945)
inexplicably spliced into this comedy-thriller, but it energizes the
film and adds to the already delirious mix of tones.
