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This is a film that, though made in 1938, is at times so self-conscious that this viewer, seventy years on, felt that its makers knew that an audience a couple of generations away would one day watch it and appreciate the jokes from a distance. Its portrayals of a succession of Anglo-British stereotypes: the barrister and his 'wife', actually the wife of a senior colleague with whom he is having an affair and an illicit holiday, the kind but daffy middle-aged governess, the cynical leisure-loving jam factory heiress on her way home to marry a peer because it will please her father, the self-obsessed dilettante musicologist, and above all the cricket-obsessed men of evident but invisible means, are introduced with affection but are also set on trajectories that will either show how misleading our initial impressions are, or leave us uncomfortable as initially sympathetic figures turn out to be obstructive and too focused on their private concerns to notice that something very sinister has happened on board their train taking them across central Europe, despite the protests of pretty heiress Iris (Margaret Lockwood). Only the folk-music collecting Gilbert (Michael Redgrave) believes that there was a Miss Froy (Dame May Whitty) in Iris's compartment, despite the insistence of the nearest medical expert that she was a hallucination brought on by concussion.
The film's mockery of British insularity made a serious point in 1938, and political sensitivity led to the omission of a scripted sequence where goose-stepping soldiers dissolved into a flock of gabbling geese. In the final shoot-out the barrister reveals himself as a pacifist who believes that everything can be settled by negotiation - as already seen, this includes his own word to his lover, Margaret, as he wheedles out of an immediate divorce and remarriage because it will prejudice his career. His waving of a white flag before the nation's security forces ends predictably. While it could be argued that Gilbert ends up representing another British stereotype of the unpredictable outsider as hero, at his first appearance he is a nuisance and even a cad, someone without any respect for his fellow hotel guests; but his overwhelming curiosity about other cultures translates into a sensitivity to the European political situation which too many of his fellow-British passengers regard as a sign of the instability of foreigners which only inconveniences them when travelling abroad and justifies their complacency about the superiority and invulnerability of the British way of life. All helped by a witty script from Frank Launder and Sidney Gilliat, which surely set a standard for keeping the pace going so quickly that the audience is amused rather than irritated by all the implausibilities; and directed for Gainsborough Pictures with acute judgement by Alfred Hitchcock.
Viewed at the National Film Theatre with![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
gervase_fen and a full house, Sunday 20 January 2008.
The film's mockery of British insularity made a serious point in 1938, and political sensitivity led to the omission of a scripted sequence where goose-stepping soldiers dissolved into a flock of gabbling geese. In the final shoot-out the barrister reveals himself as a pacifist who believes that everything can be settled by negotiation - as already seen, this includes his own word to his lover, Margaret, as he wheedles out of an immediate divorce and remarriage because it will prejudice his career. His waving of a white flag before the nation's security forces ends predictably. While it could be argued that Gilbert ends up representing another British stereotype of the unpredictable outsider as hero, at his first appearance he is a nuisance and even a cad, someone without any respect for his fellow hotel guests; but his overwhelming curiosity about other cultures translates into a sensitivity to the European political situation which too many of his fellow-British passengers regard as a sign of the instability of foreigners which only inconveniences them when travelling abroad and justifies their complacency about the superiority and invulnerability of the British way of life. All helped by a witty script from Frank Launder and Sidney Gilliat, which surely set a standard for keeping the pace going so quickly that the audience is amused rather than irritated by all the implausibilities; and directed for Gainsborough Pictures with acute judgement by Alfred Hitchcock.
Viewed at the National Film Theatre with
gervase_fen and a full house, Sunday 20 January 2008.Tags: