This remains, alongside North by Northwest, the most purely enjoyable of all Hitchcock’s films: a seamless blend of comedy, psychological insight, and acute social and political analysis which, in the words of the doyen of English film critics, Philip French of The Observer, ‘comes up dazzlingly fresh every time’. The lady who vanishes is Miss Froy, a harmless-looking elderly governess travelling back to England from Central Europe; the heroine who searches for her is a young English traveller on the same train, Iris, played by Margaret Lockwood. Their joint struggle against a combination of the encroaching forces of fascism and the obtuseness of their appeasement-minded fellow-countrymen becomes a fantastic fable for the year of Chamberlain’s Munich agreement with Hitler. Never was an ending so happy as here, when the British travellers show solidarity at the last moment across boundaries of class and gender, London is safely reached, and Iris is reunited with Miss Froy and escapes the clutches of her dreary fiance. How, after this, could you doubt that Britain would win the war?