The Lady Vanishes

Alfred Hitchcock - 1938
What can we say about Hitchcock's direction here? We have the opening big establishinbg shot. From then on, general establishment, i.e. the train from outside, comes only once or twice, but it is wonderful, in between the bits of action, at once a breath but also fast, exciting.
Hitchcock doesn't do particularly long shots; we are usually working from medium shots up. His camera is often still on this. There can be reframings, and there are also elegant, and fast, tracks and other movements to start a scene often, before it comes still. For this, he often has a few faces in the shot at once, all looking or being looked at (and inviting us to look). Off screen space is created as people are constantly looking off camera; that is the classic Hithcock shot, here.
There are some other distinctive things. He can show only the legs and waist, a sort of lowermedium shot, and in particularly dramatic punctuation points he introduces motifs like these, or cuts to an animal, or zoom-ins (one) or tracks down, to add a little something.
What is the constrcution here? A building up of an odd atmosphere, full of the pettiness and the little cruelties of the English, yet, all the same, oddly dedramatized. Then we have curiousity, the vanishing. I read 'The Birds' as the most acute expression and examination of the 'women's movement', and here we have the medicalisation of a woman's anxiety, a wish to shut her up. Wedding night and other sexual anxieties also are involved. We then move onto English communal effort, fighting the enemy, impossible not to read directly to the war.
We are played with as to the veracity of the stories, usually we are half a step ahead of the protagonists, though hardly omniscient. That there is a masterplan is clear, being slowly unravelled to us, and even more slowly to the characters (so we have a certain smugness, and a certain mystery). Suspense? Once in the train, something odd is certainly going...
The final sequence, static shots of somebody shooting, an eyeline then on what is shot at (and the oddly placed nun) is taken lightly. There is a certain joie de vivre here, a playing with Will Hay, for example, a few self-conscious and cheery plot explanations, the idea that it is all an English jape (this is at the end, the opening is really a catalogue of pettiness, in a way). Quite sprightly, this, with layers of interest.