The Story of the Bad Samaritan - some reflections on 'The Lady Vanishes'

How I wanted Sunday Night’s TV dramatization of ‘The Lady Vanishes’ to be good. Long ago, I read the book on which Alfred Hitchcock’s 1938 film was based. Published in 1936, it was originally called ‘the Wheel Spins’, though it was re-named ‘The Lady Vanishes’ after the success of the film.  I couldn’t believe how much better the written story was than the Hitchcock film, which I’ve never thought was that wonderful, though the 1979 remake was even less satisfactory. And as far as I could tell, the BBC had decided to follow the book rather more closely than either film.

I should have known better. I stuck it out for about 40 minutes and decided I’d have more fun flossing my teeth.

 

As usual, the BBC has only one way to summon up a period – through costume, and by making everyone smoke all the time to show that it is the past. I’m surprised they don’t get them to smoke while they’re asleep.  Even some of the costume was wrong. An Anglican clergyman of that period would certainly not have shaved his head. I doubt if middle-aged spinsters would have smoked in public either.  Also there were unconvincing shots of the wrong sort of steam locomotive and the wrong sort of carriages. The idea that a continental express, charging through the Balkans in the late 1930s, would have contained a piano bar is also, I think, a bit far-fetched. As usual, they couldn’t get anything else right either.   Iris, the sort of heroine, is not a very nice person at the start of the story, but she was sour in a 1936 sort of way, not in the 2013 way in which she was portrayed.  And of course the accents were all hopeless. Miss Froy, the Lady who Vanishes, was quite without the sweet, winsome appeal of the original (the passages in the book, in which her old and impoverished parents innocently wait for her return in their chilly English village home, quite unaware of the perils she is passing through, are beautifully written and make terrific pictures in the mind, which have not left me since I first read them 30 years ago).

 

But there was something else wrong, a sort of desperate urgency. When Iris gets lost in the mountains, she does so in an urgent, noisy way, rather than in the genuinely alarming but slower fashion in which she realises she is quite alone in a strange landscape, as portrayed in the book. The scenes on the train, in which a distracted and ill Iris is comforted by Miss Froy, were made needlessly jarring and unpleasant to watch. The book conveys her sunstruck, headachy discomfort so much better.

 

Ah, the book. What I love about the book is that it is such a severe dissection of English life at the time.  During a few hours’ journey in a stuffy, grimy express, somewhere on the ragged edge of the old Austria-Hungary (we never learn exactly where the journey starts, though we know it is bound for Trieste, so Yugoslavia seems likely - but which part?), we learn a great deal about that lost England which died in September 1939, and the people who lived in it.

 

Iris’s worthless, rackety life in London is cleverly hinted at. The various secrets , miseries and fears of a group of seemingly respectable and upright English people are slowly but believably revealed, so that when they all fail the test of loyalty and duty, we know that we, too, could have abandoned the poor, abducted Miss Froy to her appalling fate. But it is unpleasant, selfish Miss Carr who, despite all, refuses to give up the effort to save a person she hardly knows (because, after all, she is an Englishwoman) , and takes appalling risks to do it. There’s a lot less comedy in the book than in either film, and rightly so. It’s a morality play, a sort of Parable of the Bad Samaritan in which outward goodness counts for very little when it comes to it.

 

Ethel Lina White’s motif of the train, its engine and its driver straining every rivet, piston  and muscle to reach Trieste, when Trieste also means a particularly horrible doom for Miss Froy, drives the story along in the imagination (this is especially effective for those who are lucky enough to have been on a steam-hauled express on unwelded track, seen the smoke pour past the window, and felt the almost animal straining and panting of the locomotive and the blacksmith clatter of the wheels on the rails, but the rest of you will just have to try to picture this). You have a constant sense (which I did not feel in any film version) of the rapid approach of black terror, along with the equally rapid approach of nightfall.

 

Miss Froy’s disappearance, by the way, has absolutely nothing to do with the Nazis or a secret code.

 

Oh well, one good thing will come out of this. I shall have to read the book again.