the lady vanishes (d. alfred hitchcock, w. ethel lina white, sidney gilliat, frank launder)

High jinks, dastardly europeans, cricket lovers and a folk dance historian. So much of Hitchcock’s film seems quintessentially English. As an Englishman, it’s hard not to feel as though the film tugs on some kind of deep national cord, and not just because of Caldicott and Charters’ overriding need to discover the score in the test match. This joke wouldn’t run anymore. There’s no way a thread about cricket could be used to activate the national consciousness. Something that might have seemed comically plausible back then would be absurd now. Part of the beauty of Hitchcock and his screenwriters’ representation of Britishness is that these aren’t all warm, sympathetic characters. THey’re a mixed bunch, with mixed interests. Cowardice and selfishness are also on display. Would a child born in the UK in the 21st century still recognise these archetypes? Or has that whole world gone the way of steam trains and cricket buffs? Post-war, Hitchcock would pick up sticks and move to Hollywood. If anything represents the definitive termination of the British as a significant global influence which, for better or for worse, was still the case when my grandfather was born, it might be Hitchcock’s exile. The war, which The Lady Vanishes, for all its comic import, prefigures, would be the final nail in the coffin of his career as a British director. From then on, he would become another immigrant craftsman brought in to embellish the North American empire.

 

the emperor’s tomb (joseph roth)

Roth’s other Trotta novel is understandably less celebrated than The Radetsky March. It’s a patchy, rangy book, which sweeps from pre-war Vienna and Slovenia through the protagonist’s participation in the war, imprisonment as a POW in Siberia, and then return to Vienna where he finds himself impoverished following the collapse of the Hapsburg empire. It feels like a 500 page novel squeezed into a hundred and something pages and doesn’t entirely hang together, no matter how fascinating the individual episodes might be. Nevertheless, the sections themselves, in particular the Siberian and post-war episodes offer an unusual vision of how these moments of history happened on a human scale. As a POW  in Siberia, (an experience my great grandfather also supposedly shared), we see the ragged edges of a war which no-one is all that concerned about. Post-war Vienna, in Roth’s vision, has a curiously modern feel, where sexuality is fluid and artistic flavours of the month come and go. People try and fail to spin businesses out of nothing, which mostly fail. All of which feels very like the twenty first century.