Waste of time

People are voting emotionally.

This is a coming of age storyline that you've seen in one form or another for decades. It takes a truly unique voice to make yet another one worth watching.

It is an exhilarating, distressing, funny and profound film, with one of the more memorable film scores in years,

Always one to buck the trend, I love this film! And has done since it was made. It was the fantastic music to begin with, but it drew me in. Goodness knows why it's taken me such a lengthy time to write this. It's an excellent cast, very well photographed and makes me smile. What's not to like? So, it's different from the 1939 version? Of course it is: there's forty years between them! One isn't better than the other. They're just different. However, any film which makes me smile is a winner in my book. I have it on DVD, but I'm always glad to watch it on the telly. Did I mention I love the music? I wish I could buy that on its own.

Hammer's lamentable remake of a Hitchcock classic and unsurprisingly the studio's last picture – at least until their recent reinvention as a purveyor of horror fare. THE LADY VANISHES is an odd film indeed, one that veers unevenly between comedy, mystery and thrills and never really succeeds in any of those fields: the comedy's unfunny, the mystery's obvious and the thrills muted. It doesn't help that the lead actress – Cybill Shepherd – is horribly miscast, giving a performance so awful that some viewers may turn off because of her alone.Then again, Shepherd may not be entirely at fault – I struggle to think of an alternative actress who could have brought her shrill, screechy character to life. I generally enjoy films set aboard trains, planes, boats etc. but this one never makes good use of the location and the constant moving between carriages and compartments becomes repetitive in the extreme (although a late stage train-climbing stunt sequence is breathtakingly good).Elliott Gould seems distinctly embarrassed by his presence here and can do nothing with his character, while Angela Lansbury seems to think she's still in BEDKNOBS & BROOMSTICKS and gives a patronising turn. It's left to the Arthur Lowe and Ian Carmichael to supply some genuine humour, although sadly their characters are ill-utilised and kept off-screen for the most part. THE LADY VANISHES marks an ignoble end for a once-fine studio and languishes today as a deservedly forgotten oddity.

Cybill Shepherd's performance in this movie is so bad, it overshadows the rest of the movie. I've seen more character depth in the chorus of a high school musical! Angela Lansbury was spot on in her performance, though. Too bad the pre-"Moonlighting" Cybill had to go and muck it up.The settings were beautiful, and beautifully photographed, but they weren't enough to save this train wreck (pardon the pun). There just didn't seem to be enough tension between the characters who were "in" on the plot and those who were oblivious to it.I'd watch the original (or a Finnish comedy with Polish subtitles) before I'd ever watch this again.

Re-makes are, generally speaking, disappointing but this has to be the worst. Cybill Shepherd gives her usual acting performance (very poor), Angela Lansbury is, frankly, second rate and the rest of the cast seem embarrassed by the awful script. There seems to be, at times, an attempt at humour but it is so childish that it doesn't raise a smile. At the time that the original was made film makers could get away with this sort of plot, and Hitchcock could make it (almost) believable, but these days a little more is required. All in all an awful film which Hammer should be ashamed of as (I'm sure) most of the cast are. Steer clear of it.