To occupy my December 31st while waiting for the festivities to begin, I put in my player the recently acquired Blu-ray of The Lady Vanishes, one of my favorite Hitchcocks. If you’re not familiar, it’s about a group of travelers in a remote corner of Europe who are on a train back to England.
There, young Iris (Margaret Lockwood) realizes that the sympathetic Miss Froy (Dame May Whitty) she’d just met and sympathized with has disappeared. No one believes her, and with the help of a musician named Gilbert (Michael Redgrave), she sets out to find Miss Froy.
The film opens in a hotel, where we meet Charters and Caldicott, two Englishmen who swear by cricket and will do anything to get home in time to watch a match. This leads them to lie and do everything they can to avoid being caught up in the disappearance story, which could delay their return to England.
Naunton Wayne and Basil Radford played Charters and Caldicott, a surprisingly endearing comic duo that quickly became popular. That’s what I discovered when I looked at what else the actors had done in films. As it happens, they reprised the roles in three other films and played similar roles in 8 other features.
- The Lady Vanishes (1938) – Charters & Caldicott
- Night Train to Munich (1940) – Charters & Caldicott
- Crook’s Tour (1941) – Charters & Caldicott
- The Next of Kin (1942)
- Millions Like Us (1943) – Charters & Caldicott
- Dead of Night (1945)
- A Girl in a Million (1946)
- Quartet (1948)
- It’s Not Cricket (1949)
- Passport to Pimlico (1949)
- Stop Press Girl (1949)
- Helter Skelter (1949)
Crook’s Tour and It’s Not Cricket are the only films in which the duo headline.
It seems that the official end of Charters and Caldicott was due to the refusal of screenwriters Sidney Gilliat and Frank Launder (creators of the characters) to offer them a larger role in the film I See a Dark Stranger. Naunton Wayne and Basil Radford decided not to appear in the film and were contractually obliged to stop using the names.
Finally, in addition to the films, Naunton Wayne and Basil Radford also played variants of Charters and Caldicott on the radio. Arthur Lowe and Ian Carmichael reprised the roles for the 1979 remake of The Lady Vanishes, while Robin Bailey and Michael Aldridge did the same for the 6-episode 1985 series Charters and Caldicott, in which the duo solved murder cases, when they weren’t talking cricket, of course.
