One of the best-loved of Hitchcock's films, perhaps for the seamless blend of humor and thrills which makes its sinister and bizarre elements less threatening than, say, those in Sabotage and, much later, Strangers on a Train. Almost all the action takes place on a transcontinental train where a young English woman (Margaret Lockwood), having dozed off, awakes to find that the tweedy-whimsical old lady (Dame May Whitty) with whom she had been conversing has disappeared. Everyone else in the carriage quietly denies that she was ever there. The Lady Vanishes is squarely pre-WWII: it is 1938, and the train speeds through the Tyrolean alps to a place where nobody can be neutral. (A running-gag reference to "how England is doing"-cricket, that is-is a double entendre.) "The verve of Sidney Gilliatt's dialogue in no way submerges the director's personality. It's an excellent English film, an excellent Hitchcock film" (Claude Chabrol).