You don’t suppose there’s something in this fellow’s story, Caldicott, do you?
After all, people don’t go about tying up nuns.
Dan Heaton at Pop Matters reviews the new DVD release of Alfred Hitchcock’s The Lady Vanishes. This is a great old film, and one those who know me well know is one of my favorites because it’s a classic example of the Innocent Person Embroiled in an International Scheme — which is my favorite movie in all of its many iterations.
Heaton tells us that the new DVD release includes as a bonus another film I had never heard of before — John Baxter’s 1941 feature, Crook’s Tour, which is a kind of sequel to The Lady Vanishes, “starring Basil Radford and Naunton Wayne as their characters Charters and Caldicott … [the] self-absorbed bachelors who care more about catching the cricket match than finding Miss Froy.”
That duo provides a good bit of the humor in The Lady Vanishes, which in turn makes their unexpected courage at the climax of that film an inspiring moment that seems to convey Hitchcock’s affectionate faith in the British people on the eve of World War II.
I hadn’t realized that these characters lived on after that first film, not just in Crook’s Tour, but in appearances in other films, BBC radio serials, and eventually even their own BBC television series.
So, has anyone seen Crook’s Tour or those other later films? Are these worth tracking down?
(P.S. If you haven’t seen The Lady Vanishes, you can watch it now on Hulu or on YouTube, although I’m not sure how much longer the latter link will stay up.)
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