Recently, I had the opportunity to rewatch the 1997 film Agatha when it appeared on Turner Classic Movies as part of a mini-festival of films about people who have disappeared. Directed by Michael Apted and based on a novel by the film’s screenwriter, Kathleen Tynan, Agatha provides a wholly fictional account of what happened to Agatha Christie on those eleven days in 1926 when she disappeared.

I can’t double down enough on the word “fictional” here! Never mind the basic plot, (SPOILERS HERE in ROT-13, if you really want to know: Puevfgvr qvgpurf ure pne naq purpxf vagb gur fnzr fcn ubgry nf ure uhfonaq Nepuvr’f zvfgerff, Anapl Arryr, pnyyf urefrys Grerfn Arryr, naq frgf nobhg cybggvat ure bja fhvpvqr va n jnl gung jvyy rvgure senzr Anapl sbe ure “zheqre” be creuncf znxr gur zvfgerff srry fb greevoyr nobhg nppvqragnyyl xvyyvat Ntngun gung vg ehvaf ure ybir sbe Ntngun’f uhfonaq.), which is all silly fun. And yet Agatha would have you, if not believe, then accept the following:

1. At the time of her divorce, Agatha Christie looked like Vanessa Redgrave, while the athletic Nancy Neele cut but chubby and checked into the spa to lose weight. (untrue)
2. Agatha was childless. (Apologies to Rosaline.)
3. After being married to someone who looked like Timothy Dalton, Agatha would find herself kissing a pompous shlub half her height, played by Dustin Hoffman. (Look, I’m short, too, so this isn’t inconceivable; it just looks ridiculous here.)
4. And one for which I’d better use code: Gur uvtuyl eryvtvbhf, fgebatyl zbeny Puevfgvr zvtug unir orra fb qvfgenhtug bire ybfvat ure orybirq Nepuvr (nf jryy nf ure zbgure, jub unq whfg qvrq ohg vfa’g zragvbarq va gur svyz) gung fur jbhyq pbagrzcyngr fhvpvqr, ohg vg’f uneq gb oryvrir fur jbhyq senzr Anapl Arryr va fcvgr.

Anyway, I’m not here to talk about Agatha. Watching the film inspired me to think about much better movies I’ve seen where people vanish. Of course, in Agatha, the point of view lies firmly with the vanished lady (with occasional assists from Hoffman’s investigative journalist, a minor role originally but made much bigger when the actor insisted on rewriting the script.) Most movies about disappearance focus on the mystery of what happened to the person (or people) who disappeared. Those I would recommend span over seven decades, and they offer intriguing variations on the trope of disappearance. Here they are in chronological order:

So Long at the Fair (1950)

Jean Simmons had certainly made a splash onscreen as a teenager, most notably as young Estella in David Lean’s brilliant Great Expectations and, at 19) as Ophelia opposite Laurence Olivier in Hamlet. Her leading role here feels like the start of her adult career. Simmons plays Vicky Barton, who is taken by her older brother Johnny (David “George Banks” Tomlinson) to Paris for a brief visit to the opening of the World’s Fair there. The town is mobbed with people, but Johnny had the foresight to book a couple of nights at a lovely little hotel (Vicky’s room looks out at the Eiffel Tower) run by the efficient Madame Hervé (Cathleen Nesbit). Even though Johnny is exhausted, Vicky makes him take her to a fine dinner and to the Moulon Rouge, where they enjoy the can-can show and Vicky blushes at the attentions of artist George Hathaway (Dirk Bogarde, also making a jump into leading status).

The next morning, Vicky leaves her room (#17) and goes to wake up Johnny in his room (#19). Except . . . there is no Room 19, and there is no sign of Johnny anywhere. Furthermore, when Vicky seeks assistance, Madame Hervé, her brother, and the bellhop all insist that the young woman arrived at the hotel alone. (Cathleen Nesbit’s transformation from kindly to sinister is nicely played.) Through a series of unfortunate events, Vicky is unable to convince her fellow guests, the police, even the British Consul that her brother ever existed, let alone disappeared.

This film falls into the “we know something’s off because we’ve seen the missing person” category. Even if we hadn’t spent time in Johnny’s presence, Madame Hervé and her staff are acting so suspiciously that our sympathies immediately fall with Vicky. Plus, it’s only a matter of time before the artist steps in: we watched Johnny lend a fifty franc note to George Hathaway the previous evening. Until she gains such a strong ally, things look bleak for Vicky and the film makes the most of that suspenseful situation. Once she and George start working together, it becomes more of a detective story, although you might find the dearth of clues a significant detriment to your own solving of the case. 

There’s also the pleasure of finding that the French Commissaire of Police is played by none other than Austin Trevor, who three decades earlier had played none other than Hercule Poirot three times! Even though it takes a while for the Commissaire to get on board with Vicky’s complaint, Trevor is given a pivotal moment at the end where, like Poirot before him, he faces the witnesses and offers a summation of the criminals’ plot.

So Long at the Fair is a charming film, subtly eerie and beautifully acted. It is based on a 1947 novel by Anthony Thorne, but the basic story idea hearkens back to 1897 and was used with variations a great many times, including by a certain author who we will come across presently.

Dangerous Crossing (1953)

Oh, let’s go there right now! The author I was alluding to is blog favorite John Dickson Carr, who was as prolific in his work on radio as he was a novelist. Perhaps his most famous radio play was 1943’s Cabin B-13, and while one of the saddest facts for fans of Carr was how he was all but ignored by the film world, this play became the basis for Dangerous Crossing, a taut thriller starring another young beautiful actress, Jeanne Crain, who was at the peak of her career.

Crain plays Ruth Stanton Bowman, an eager young newlywed who with her husband John (Carl Betz) embarks on a sea voyage where they will be hopefully spending much time in their cabin, pointlessly relocated to Cabin B-16! We hardly have time to register that Ruth is 1) an heiress, and 2) married after a whirlwind courtship, when John suggests she watch the ship set sail on deck while he secures their money. But then John disappears! What’s more, Ruth finds her luggage in Cabin B-18, where the crew insists she has always been books as a single woman. Her luggage bears her maiden name, and she doesn’t even have a wedding ring.

Poor Ruth finds herself in the same dilemma as poor Vicky. Fortunately, she faints and meets the charming ship’s doctor Paul Manning (Michael “Klaatu barada nikto” Rennie), who takes a shine to her and does not dismiss her as a crazy person. Good thing, too, because Carr has a clever way of explaining John’s disappearance and the reason for it, which will be apparent only to . . . oh, well, everyone who reads classic murder mysteries!

Even at a running time of 75 minutes, the film feels padded to me, and I prefer the radio play. But Crain and Rennie are fine here, and it’s just a pleasure to see something, anything, by Carr put up on the screen.

Bunny Lake Is Missing (1965)

An American single mother named Ann Lake (Carol Lynley), recently moved to London, has enrolled her daughter in a posh elementary school. But when she goes to pick Bunny up after her first day, the little girl is missing and the school’s staff claims to have never met her. What separates this scenario from the one’s listed above is that the audience has never seen Bunny either! And as Inspector Newhouse (Laurence Olivier) investigates the school, Bunny’s distraught mother and kindly Uncle Steven (Keir Dullea), he begins to suspect that Bunny Lake never existed!

The early/mid 60’s were packed with films like this one, with big stars and/or directors (this one is helmed by Otto Preminger) and eerie stories packed with twists. Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? Who Slew Auntie Roo? Hush, Hush, Sweet Charlotte . . . the list goes on. The twist here is especially nasty, the music by Paul Glass is haunting, and the performances by the three stars are great, abetted by creepy turns from Noel Coward (as a lecherous old man, of all things) and Martita Hunt.

Lynley does an especially fine job of imbuing Ann with enough ambiguity that for the longest time we’re not quite sure how sane she is. As she is put through the wringer, however, she begins to summon a strength she didn’t know she had. The final twenty minutes or so, beginning with a deliciously creepy scene in a doll hospital, provide a chilling climax to the proceedings.

Picnic at Hanging Rock (1975)

Back when Australian director Peter Weir actually made his films in Australia, he became an international sensation with his third film, a period piece about a group of schoolgirls who go off on a field trip to Hanging Rock. Several of them disappear, along with one of the teachers, and the resulting tumult shakes the complacent foundations of white society.

On the one hand, this is a lush, beautiful movie, with a fantastic cast led by Rachel Roberts as the school’s headmistress. If you like your mysteries to be utterly confounding and dreamlike, then this is for you. If you want answers, however, . . . well, Picnic is not that kind of movie. Weir is going for something different here, a theme he would pursue again in The Last Wave. Then he came to America, made the brilliant Harrison Ford Amish thriller Witness, and never looked back.

One wonders if the Australian film industry has . . . disappeared!

One of My Wives Is Missing (1976)

In 1960, French playwright Robert Thomas (I imagine he pronounces it
“Row-BEAR To-MAHHH”) wrote a play called Trap for a Lonely Man. American TV network ABC must’ve secured the rights to it because they ended up making three adaptations of the play over eighteen years. The first, 1969’s Honeymoon with a Stranger, was co-adapted by mystery author Henry Slesar and starred Janet Leigh and Rossano Brazzi. The third film, Vanishing Act, came out in 1986 and had the best cast: Mike Farrell, Margot Kidder, Fred Gwynne, and Elliot Gould; it was adapted by the great team of Richard Levinson and William Link.

You can watch any of these and have a good time; the last two are virtually identical in plot. But I’m going to focus on the movie in the middle because it’s the first one I saw and is therefore my favorite. We’ve noted several films where the person reporting someone missing is deemed insane before he or she is able to clear up matters. One of My Wives Is Missing takes the idea to the next level: Daniel Corban reports the disappearance of his new bride to the local police. They were on their honeymoon and had an argument, Mrs. Corban stormed out, and too much time has passed for Daniel to sit around and do nothing.

As Corban begs Inspector Levine (Jack Klugman) to take his complaint seriously, Elizabeth Corban returns, apologizing profusely for worrying her husband. There’s just one problem: Daniel insists that this woman is not his wife. Is he insane? Or is something funny going on? If it’s the latter, what is this woman after?  And who exactly is working with her, and to what purpose? All these questions are answered most satisfactorily, making this film (and its cousins) great examples of both a disappearance movie and a conspiracy thriller.

The Vanishing (1988)

I am talking about the Dutch film Spoorloos, which literally means “Traceless” but was translated as The Vanishing and not the English-language version director George Sluizer would go on to make an in 1993 starring Jeff Bridges. Yes, Spoorloos is about a disappearance, but it’s also about obsession, about the need to find a solution to the mystery – and isn’t this something that all of us can understand???

Rex and Saskia are lovers on a holiday in France. They stop at a gas station, and Saskia goes into the shop to buy some drinks. She never returns. Years pass, and Rex cannot move on. He finds another lover, but his need to know the truth about what happened to Saskia jeopardizes his new relationship and poisons any chance at happiness.

Fortunately – or not – there is someone who knows the truth. And he has been watching Rex and feeding off his obsession. And finally, he reaches out to the bereaved man with an offer that leads to a truly disturbing ending. The greatest crime of the American remake is how it ruins that ending, so trust me and don’t bother with it.

Searching (2018)

I did not expect much from this film, to be honest. It relies on a gimmick: the entire story is shown through computer screens and smart phones. But in the end, the story itself, about a man still grieving the loss of his wife to cancer, wakes up one morning to discover his daughter has disappeared.

David Kim (John Cho) does what any concerned parent might do: he calls people and checks his daughter Margot’s accounts in order to figure out where she might be. What he discovers – cancelled appointments, missing money – frightens him enough to call the police. He meets Detective Rosemary Vick (Debra Messing), and together they begin to look for the missing girl.

David’s search turns into a gripping mystery, as one lead after another creates a list of surprising suspects and haunting possible scenarios regarding Margot’s fate. I didn’t expect how beautifully the film would provide the elements of a traditional whodunnit, combined with the built-in emotional fallout surrounding parent-child relationships. And there’s a humdinger of a twist as well that leads to a satisfying finale.

Writer-director Aneesh Chaganty revisited the same territory in his 2023 follow-up film Missing. This time, it’s the mother who goes missing while on vacation with her suspicious new boyfriend and her teenaged daughter who uses technology to try and find her. It may feel a little derivative after watching Searching, which benefits mightily from the performances of Cho and Messing, but it is also a highly entertaining, twisty little mystery with a lovely surprise at its climax that I did not see coming!

I think most mystery fans would agree with me that when it comes to crimes in crime stories, nothing beats murder. But the films listed here – and, I’m sure, many others – capitalize on the ambiguous nature of a disappearance. And while I prefer a good explanation at the end, these films prove that the very uncertainty of what happens to someone who disappears becomes, in capable creative hands, a surefire recipe for suspenseful entertainment.