Together with The 39 Steps, this inspired mix of mystery, comedy, and romance catapulted Hitchcock to international fame. Cowritten by Sidney Gilliat and Frank Launder, the always clever script pits a bossy debutante and a young music scholar against a ring of ruthless spies. At first glance The Lady Vanishes appears to be a frothy, lightweight treat, a testament to Alfred Hitchcock's nimble touch. This snappy, sophisticated romantic thriller begins innocently enough, as a contingent of eccentric tourists spend the night in a picture-postcard village inn nestled in the Swiss Alps before setting off on the train the next morning. In a wonderfully Hitchcockian twist on "meeting cute," attractive young Iris (Margaret Lockwood) clashes with brash music student Gilbert (Michael Redgrave) when his nocturnal concerts give her no peace. She gets him kicked out of his room, so he barges in on hers: True love is inevitable, but not before they are both plunged into an international conspiracy. The next day on the train, kindly old Mrs. Froy (Dame May Whitty) vanishes from her train car without a trace and the once quarrelsome couple unite to search the train and uncover a dastardly plot. No one is as he or she seems, but sorting out the villains from the merely mysterious is a challenge in itself, as our innocents abroad face resistance from the entire passenger list. Hitchcock effortlessly navigates this vivid thriller from light comedy to high tension and back again, creating one of his most enchanting and entertaining mysteries. [+]

A comedy about a love-sick musician, who, after creating a great musical masterpiece, is mistakenly locked up in a brand new psychiatric hospital

A landmark title in the evolution of CinemaScope, Bhowani Junction is a fascinating but exasperating instance of a provocative film running head-on into studio interference and censorship. This would be the next-to-last project in George Cukor's long history as an MGM director, and despite its rejection at the time, admirers regard it as one of his most personal achievements. What's irreducibly admirable is Cukor's sensuous embrace of India as both the film's location and its "major character. " With F. A. Young as cinematographer (six years before Young shot David Lean's Lawrence of Arabia), this director chiefly associated with intimate settings and soundstage productions created rich, gold-brown canvases surging powerfully with vast crowds and unrest. Ava Gardner plays a half-British, half-Indian woman trying to find an identity for herself at that moment in 1947 when Great Britain was preparing to withdraw from the country it had ruled for two centuries. Her dilemma is focused through her relationships with several men: a fellow half-caste (Bill Travers) who's been her longtime lover, a slimy British junior officer (Lionel Jeffries), a pure-blood Indian aspiring to make her his bride (Francis Matthews), and the senior British officer (Stewart Granger) whose fierce ambivalence must inevitably mutate into passionate love. If it's sensuousness you're after, you can do a lot worse than having the luscious Gardner at the center of your movie, and the actress responded beautifully to both the exotic setting and Cukor's direction. Alas, Granger was mostly a stick (Cukor wanted Trevor Howard), and the script is awful-structurally incoherent and endlessly recycling bald-faced declarations of the divided-ethnicity theme. [+]