There is another Caldicott and Charters

I know. It's a little as if one had heard there'd been another holiday declared, smack in the middle of the longest month in the Northern Hemisphere. Buds would break, breeches'd tumble, and all the midges of summer would slumber on. And so they might, for 90 minutes, give or take an anti-climactic line of credits.

For lads to whom the sound of music is the thwack of a bat, the news is not untimely that the conspicuously chaste cricket chums of The Lady Vanishes were brought forth again, less than a year later, in Night Train to Munich by Carol Reed. Their biographers are the same, Sidney Gilliat and Frank Launder; Margaret Lockwood is back, and Michael Redgrave has gone up a register in Rex Harrison. Hitchcock's looming portents have given way to social comedy, of stratified nuance and slender suspense, even as the speculations of 1938 have ripened into the clarity of 1939.

Yet just when you'd think, Reed's strains of certain war might have sorted out the shared pyjamas of Hitchcock's Mandrika, Reed's boys double down on diffidence for as long as a test match might possibly be attended, despite wartime travel annoyances. But of course hell hath no fury greater than a fan finally barred from his sport, as the two films make clear. It's then that our sleepingly droll and ditzy patriots emerge as Harry's hellions at Honfleur, to hand the arrogant villain a well-timed shot or two of his own medicine. All of England is on fire, and every laughingstock shall do his propagandistic duty.

For, all this time, the menace of "conflict" has been depicted in its most horrid light, as a case of coitus interruptus out of Keats. Margaret Lockwood's character's mistaken-beau problem is given the most sympathetic airing in both films, while C and Ch are reserved as currants of mirth in a British trifle. The day will come when everyone will see through that, but it's not yet here; and, ever loathe to ask for permission for treats we know is forthcoming, we take them before they cool. Besides, these hotties deserve to get to their match, and a couple of raffish reels of cinema seem the shortest route.

To compare: Hitchcock's is the zingier lifter of shirts; but Reed and these writers had a slighter original text, and crafted a charming result. Lockwood is terrific, in both, and Harrison is sexy and subtle in three different rôles as a spy. How he could wear clothes. Re-call Reed's work with Graham Greene and Sir Ralph Richardson in The Fallen Idol, and with Welles in The Third Man - and that Lean was his understudy. Queue it.

Meanwhile, can you stand it: countless epiphanies after David and Jonathan, we still delight in the Amos 'n' Andy of valour in funny, little amateurs in every sense of the word. Yet Caldicott and Charters are able, in Ford Madox Ford's perfect phrase, to stand up in films from England which stood outside the American imagination.

Alfred Hitchcock
The Lady Vanishes
Gaumont, 1938©
Criterion Collection©


Carol Reed
Night Train to Munich
Gaumont, 1939©
Criterion Collection ©