sorry for the brief delay - family vacations and all that...
I didn't read as much of the film essay material before starting this film because I don't obviously want to give away the elements of what is a mystery/thriller - but let me start with this
Hitchcock is one of those directors I don't know a lot about short of Psycho and The Birds - I knew he was English but had no idea he had a career in England prior to coming to the US.
This film was a total mystery to me - a romantic thriller with elements of Comedy - and to be honest, I didn't like it very much
the Essays make it clear that in one sense, this is a story about the English. Several English Travelers are on a train in a foreign country - (a fictional Balkan one with a dictatorship) and are a cross section of English Life - you have an upper class barrister, a middle class artist, a couple of comedic chaps who are basically Cricket obsessed fans, and the spunky daughter of a businessman about to go off and get married - (and that's not even all of them) - As the story implies, a disappearance on the train starts the thriller part of the story
Looking back I can appreciate better what Alfred was doing, and there are definite shadows of the tensions rising with Nazi Germany - (by 1938, Germany had annexed Austria, most of Czechoslovakia, and was clearly mobilizing for war) - The comedic duo of Charters and Caldicott are introduced here, and a second movie (which I didn't watch) was included as part of the collection where they are the principal characters -
It's definitely a thriller that keeps you engaged, and there's some excellent documentaries that describe how it was shot (on a 90 foot set, basically) - and upon re-watching of the special features, one misses how much of the train atmosphere was captured on a regular set - to capture that kind of vibe always rocking and background shots, one could easily think it was shot in part on a train set, but it was all in the studios...
As a whole, a nice intro to the film, but I think I'll appreciate his later American stuff a bit more - this is clearly a British film with nuances I have missed, but it does get your attention
RB
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