Hitchcock and screenwriters Sidney Gilliat and Frank Launder retained White’s basic story about a young woman named Iris (played by Margaret Lockwood) who is crossing Europe by train and becomes alarmed when Miss Froy (Dame May Whitty), an older lady she has met on the journey, suddenly disappears and no one will admit to having seen her.
While crime writer Ethel Lina White (1876-1944) is not particularly well-remembered today, she was part of the so-called “golden age” of British crime fiction in the 1930s, and her books were popular on both sides of the Atlantic. She had started writing as a child, but it was not until she gave up a position in the government pensions department at age 50 that she began to publish novels. After three books of mainstream fiction, she produced more than a dozen crime thrillers, and The Wheel Spins (1936) was the first of these to be adapted as a film. It was originally assigned to a different director in 1937, but production difficulties intervened, and Hitchcock agreed to take over the project the following year: the title was changed to The Lost Lady, and then to The Lady Vanishes. Hitchcock and screenwriters Sidney Gilliat and Frank Launder retained White’s basic story about a young woman named Iris (played by Margaret Lockwood) who is crossing Europe by train and becomes alarmed when Miss Froy (Dame May Whitty), an older lady she has met on the journey, suddenly disappears and no one will admit to having seen her. But the screen version makes Miss Froy a considerably more complex character and also adds a romantic interest for Iris (played by Michael Redgrave) who is very different from the one in the book. Almost all of the novel takes place on board the train, while a significant portion of the film’s opening is set at an inn where the passengers must stay after an avalanche halts their journey. Many of the other travelers in the film are original to the screenplay, including the two humorous cricket aficionados Charters and Caldicott (Basil Radford and Naunton Wayne), who proved to be so popular that Radford and Wayne brought them back for several additional movies.