There was clearly a commitment to deliver a high quality remake here... and in many ways it is just that. High production values, location filming, excellent cast, and a leading lady with the charm and edge necessary to bring a potentially unsympathetic character to life. In fact ion another day this would indeed have been a star making turn. Sadly though, all the worthy intentions of the films makers, in particular the unnecessary lengthening of the opening piece, the addition of the girls back story, etc. put a drag on the film that it takes almost the entirety of the rest of the movie to overcome. Those worthy intentions which are also apparent in the reshaping of the earlier films comedy characters Chalmers & Caldicot, (two Colonel Blimp type figures that leavened the earlier film with humour at just the right moments) into two equally stereotypical, but far less humorous Maiden Aunt types. Then just as the films slow start and general heaviness are fading and the stories drama begins to take hold, it jettisons all that Hitchcock brought to the final scenes, dispensing with the coming together of so many disparate types with all their flaws and foolishness in the face of a common and soon to be tyrannical enemy, and fades out with damp squib, supposedly more plausible in its own dull way, as if plausibility is essential for suspense! Dear film makers, Hitch knew what he was doing, beware of thinking you know better.

The title character is a brat and most unsympathetic. So when "stuff" starts happening to her you wondering if it her personality, her drinking to excess, a possible concussion from and earlier fall, potential insanity, whatever. You simply don't know.Production values are very high. They went to a lot of trouble to produce a "Poirot-like" world for this very independent strong minded woman. Tuppence Middleton does "yeoman's work" in developing the central character. The plot device reminds me very much of the recent film "Flightplan" with Jodie Foster who loses track of her daughter on a overseas flight and NO ONE believes her when she tells the truth.It, of course, is maddening because we are put into the position of the title character and her traveling companions. The British are number one at mysteries, and this is well worth the time to watch a guess about what is going on. Enjoy (on the edge of your seat).

Hitchcock's movie is wildly over-rated and people are far too snowed by the mumbling, bumbling cricket fans, Michael Redgrave's charm and Lockwood's beauty-in-distress.The new version may not be perfect but it is most definitely not a remake of the 1938 movies, it's an adaptation of the book and far closer to the novel The Wheel Spins. Does it wrap up too quickly? Well, so does the book, unfortunately.Hitchcock added way too much farce and a silly gun battle that veer so far from the nature of the novel as to be almost unbelievable.Despite the ending, I recommend The Wheel Spins unreservedly. Its a dark psychological study of a mind almost sinking into madness. The author does a wonderful job of writing about a socialite who is drawn into a mystery way beyond any trouble she's ever had to deal with, one that makes her for the first time in her life feel alone and helpless.

I probably made a mistake in coming to this most recent remake of "The Lady Vanishes" just days after watching Hitchcock's definitive 1939 version. There's just no comparison. Hitch's version was fast moving, exciting, suspenseful, funny and sexy while this version was by contrast, turgid, dull, predictable, humourless and staid.The central character of Iris garners no interest from the viewer right from the start and quite why she's made to fall down a steep hill after witnessing a scene between the illicit lovers "Mr & Mrs Todmorton" is anyone's guess. Anyway, back at the hotel she throws a strop and decides to let her so called friends return to England before her, although within a day she's hey-presto on the next train herself, free spirit that she is. There she bumps into a friendly middle-aged woman who befriends her in the face of foreign frostiness, before the latter makes like the title and precipitates her attempts to find her and save her from a dastardly fate.Only thing is you get no sense of connection between Iris and Miss Froy, in fact the latter witters on so much that if she sat next to me on a train I'd welcome any chance I got to escape her attentions. Moreover there's no mystery at all, the Hitchcock reveal of Miss Froy's writing her name in the condensation of the train window substituted for an English newspaper discarded in her compartment. There's no mysterious nun to alert suspicion, the romance between Iris and the professor's young assistant appears out of thin air while the rescue conclusion is wholly devoid of thrills.I didn't feel the cast did much to lift an already stodgy production either, but the starriest players ever couldn't have made this dead duck fly. In trying, I presume to distance itself from being a slavish copy of the famous original it seemed to completely forget it was meant to be a romantic comedy-thriller.Now excuse me while I try to forget I ever saw this whole dreary programme...