I caught the beginning of The Lady Vanishes years ago when it was on tv. There was a Hitchcock season on and I videoed it, but after the lady vanished I gave up and decided to finish it another time. Subsequently the tape was lost or gone over and it took The Times giving away Hitch dvds every day last week for me to get hold of this again.
It's much funnier than I remembered, there's a lot of xenophobia going on and it is rather amusing. Michael Redgrave absolutely steals the show with his delightfully off-beat performance, who knew he was young once? The film is tight, economical, as you'd expect from Hitch. It is rather predictable though, that would be my only problem with it but then again it's been ripped off so many times since (most recently with Jodie Foster's Flightplan) that is forgivable. A good cast, well made, entertaining film that still holds up today.
The second old thriller I saw was Sorry, Wrong Number, which I've wanted to see for years because I adore Barbara Stanwyck and she got oscar nominated for her turn here. I stumbled across it on sky and stopped everything I had planned to see it. Babs is good but not great, she's done much better work before and gone unrecognised by the geriatric free-dvd club. This is a bog-standard thriller about an invalid wife (where have all the stories about invalid wives gone? 
) who accidentally overhears two people plotting a murder over the phone and slowly but surely we feel it might be her murder being plotted. I thought from the plot summary it was a comedy 
, oh well. It's a decent film, rather dated, at times stretching things but Stanwyck's turn alongside an able cast with the likes of Burt Lancaster and Ann Richards (who should have had a better career) elevate it above the usual film of this sort.
Some from thrillers to the thriller, Michael Jackson, as impersonated by Diego Luna in Mister Lonely. There is no getting away from this being an art film (it played for about 2 days at one of the smaller cinemas in London and I think I had a couple of other films that weekend I wanted to see, so I missed it), as such it will be divisive. I'm stuck somewhere in the middle. The set up is that Diego Luna is a lonely Michael Jackson lookalike in Paris who befriends a Marilyn Monroe (Samantha Morton, far too unsexual an actress for the part but she plays the mannerisms splendidly) and gets invited to an estate in Scotland to be alongside a troupe of other impersonators "living as" their celebrities.
This is all very well and good (and cute) as far as it goes. Director Harmony Korine misses no opportunity to explore some very nice visuals, and even chucks in a seemingly unrelated subplot about nuns in Africa who jump out of planes whilst being guided by Werner Herzog (that idea sounds so brilliant, and occasionally it is). The problem is the film meanders (one assumes that is the intent), there's not much characterisation beneath the veneer of the celebrities they ape (again, certainly the intent) and whilst doing what they set out to (style over any semblance of substance) that doesn't make it a successful watch for the audience. I'd be very reluctant to "recommend" it, on top of all that it gets ridiculously depressing in terms of content and imagery, but if the casting/premise intrigues you it's probably worth checking out.