So Long at the Fair

This 1950 British film, co-directed by Antony Darnborough and Terence Fisher, is among the best versions of the classic vanishing-person mystery. Vicky Barton and her brother Johnny travel from Naples to see the 1889 Paris Exhibition and take separate rooms at their hotel. When she wakes in the morning, both her brother and his room have disappeared, and the hotel staff insist no such person ever existed. The tension comes from nobody believing what she says; Vicky has lost not only a person but has to defend the reliability of her own memory. The painter played by Dirk Bogarde is the only one who believes her. Jean Simmons's performance and the period design carry the film. It is very different work from Terence Fisher's later Hammer horrors. Who it's for: viewers who like classic British mystery and period thrillers. Who it's not for: anyone bothered by the conveniences in the solution's logic, or by a woman character who keeps waiting to be rescued.