Tradecraft: The Lady Vanishes Again

Deadline reports that there's another remake of Alfred Hitchcock's The Lady Vanishes in the works at the BBC. Writer Fiona Seres is turning back to The Wheel Spins, the novel that inspired the highly enjoyable 1938 Hitchcock spy flick. Set in the Balkans in 1931, the new version will tell the familiar tale of a young British woman (Cleanskin's Tuppence Middleton) traveling alone abroad who befriends an elderly lady on a train (Selina Cadell) only to awaken later to find she's vanished without a trace. Spooks/MI-5 veterans Keeley Hawes and Gemma Jones, Casino Royale's Jesper Christensen, The Hour's Julian Rhind-Tutt, and Page Eight's Tom Hughes (as love interest Max) round out the passengers on the train. The big question, of course, is who will play the comic relief cricket lovers Charters and Caldicott? I suppose it's possible the pair won't be present, since they were original creations of Hitchcock's screenwriters Frank Launder and Sidney Gilliat and not present in the novel... but can you really imagine The Lady Vanishes without them? (They turned up in the 1979 Hammer remake.) Assuming Fry and Laurie are too big for this sort of thing, I would love to see The League of Gentlemen's Mark Gatiss and Steve Pemberton in those roles, personally. The 90-minute adaptation is set to start filming later this month in Budapest, and to air on BBC1 at Christmas. I'd hazard it's got a good chance of turning up later in the US on PBS' Masterpiece Mystery.

Read my review of Hitchcock's The Lady Vanishes here.