The Lady Vanishes -Today

The classic Alfred Hitchcock film, “The Lady Vanishes” is one of my favorite movies, but how long will it be, before our society doesn’t get it? We’ll need to make an updated version.

Challenges

1) Power Struggle: American and British people can no longer be the grand patrons in a tiny unknown Alpine country. No looking down on the locals and complaining about what a backwater the place is. Inhabitants, benefiting from the European Union, will be looking down on them, sneering at their disability to speak local and other European lingos.

Can you find the advertising slogan that represents the new world order, by clicking on my up-to-date teabag?

2) Environmental Correctness: The bowl of trash, which includes the clue of the Harriman’s HERBal tea bag, cannot be thrown out the open train window to the four winds. How will Michael Redgrave ever realize that Margaret Lockwood isn’t just flying along on a drug-induced experience, when she describes meeting Miss Froy?

3) Women’s Position in Society: Iris Henderson can be fresh from traveling around the world, but she can no longer depend on her parent’s money to send her there. She must have a job. In the Internet age, she can’t depend on being a journalist or a photographer, those careers are valid only up through the end of the 20’th century. A European fund-manager, perhaps? Or might she be promoting that American jam that represents her family business?

The evil doctor can no longer get away with implying that women are just a bundle of nerves when explaining away her condition. That’s ok because no doctor is going to be offering free health care to her nowadays anyway.

Iris would not be preparing to marry “the blue-blooded check chaser”. She might have a little flat with him in London though, and be considering marriage.

4) Gay Friendly: Charters and Caldicott , the two cricket-crazy friends are still trying to get back in time for the cricket finals. Instead of a dearth of Birtish sporting information in the newspaper, they will need to complain about lack of wifi reception or problems charging their hand-held electronic devices.

Very little updating needs to take place when it comes to the humor involved in their sharing the maid’s bed, and her frequent, and unexpected, access to her “wardrobe”.

5) Cute Meet: Gilbert and Iris’s classical love-hate, aggravated-meeting romantic comedy relationship can stand. Guess some things haven’t changed in nearly eighty years.