![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() The Lady Vanishes is one of the greatest train movies from the genre's golden era, challenged only in the master's oeuvre by North By Northwest for the title of best comedy thriller ever made. Much of what happens could only take place on a railway line – passengers delayed together by an avalanche classes compartmentalised strangers trapped together as they're transported across a continent an engine driver killed in crossfire a carriage disconnected and shunted on to a branch line an intrepid hero struggling from one carriage to another outside a fast-moving train as other locomotives rush by clues in the form of a name traced in the steam on a window, and the label on a tea packet briefly adhering to another window and above all the enforced intimacy on this rhythmically seductive transport moving on its own tracks, independent of the changing landscape around it. He loved them, they figure significantly in his work and never more so than in The Lady Vanishes. Hitchcock and railways go together like a locomotive and tender. ![]()
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