The Lady Vanishes

The Lady Vanishes (1938)
IMDB #234 [http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0030341/]

The Gist:
Tell me if this plot sounds familiar. A woman is on a train with someone, she goes to sleep and wakes up and the older woman is gone and there is some conspiracy where no one claims to have seen the woman on the train in the first place, something sinister afoot. The young woman had received a bump on the head earlier, and now is trying desperately to hold on to the idea that old woman did exist, must exist. Also the old woman had written her name in the window, she sees it just when she's starting to doubt herself but of course it clears up before she can prove anything. ...If anyone has seen the mediocre movie Flightplan, that film is kind of a direct ripoff of this premise. And yet with everything that was done wrong with the premise almost seventy years afterward, Lady Vanishes manages to get everything right. It strikes a sort of theatrical tone that expertly undermines the the credibility of the plot instead of having to painstakingly establish why the conspiracy exists. Instead, Hitchcock turns the cute old lady into a badass spy and throws in a crazy fist fight with a magician and a final shootout in a train car where no one seems to need to reload their guns. If that sounds awesome to you, then you are right.