But her brother has vanished without a trace. Even his room is gone, now posing as a bathroom. The hotel staff, led by cooly officious Cathleen Nesbitt, are unanimous that the brother was never there, and Simmons had arrived alone.
Poor young Simmons is at her wits end, until she follows a lead: dashing British artist Dirk Bogarde, whom she and her brother had briefly met the day before. Bogarde rises to the occasion in British hero fashion, and is soon obsessed with solving the mystery of the missing brother.
How others will see it. So Long at the Fair was a box office success and received favorable critical notice, though it was ignored by BAFTA. Today at imdb.com, the movie has a respectable user rating of 7.1 out of 10, and the 2400 user votes is fairly high, especially when compared with Bogarde's 1951 feature Blackmailed, which has all of 45 user votes.
The user reviews are nearly uniformly positive, and often note the plot's similarity with Hickcock's more famous film The Lady Vanishes (1938), which also has a beautiful young woman attempting to prove the existence of a missing person. We prefer the present movie.
How I felt about it. The leads, Bogarde and (especially) Simmons were rising film stars in 1950. Simmons was well-known for her role as Ophelia in Lawrence Olivier's masterwork Hamlet (1948). Bogarde and Simmons were both signed to J. Arthur Rank. But the two would never appear together again in a film, partly because RKO owner Howard Hughes soon purchased Simmons' contract from Rank.
Despite her relative youth, Simmons shows considerable acting prowess here in a demanding role. She had a marvelous high-pitched British accent, reminiscent of Audrey Hepburn. Her face reminds one of another British actress, Vivien Leigh.
One unexplained plot twist involves a talkative servant (Zena Marshall) who can confirm the existence of Simmons' brother. She takes a ride on a hot air balloon at the exposition. It catches fire and all aboard are killed. It is as if Nesbitt's glum and elderly brother Marcel Poncin, who has been spying on Simmons all day, has somehow sabotaged the balloon.
Another minor flaw is the relish in which Bogarde undertakes the mission to prove Simmons' hotel is covering up her brother's disappearance. Sneaking around the hotel at night is one thing; acrobatic feats that lead to breaking and entering is another. He even pushes through a wall to prove the hotel's subterfuge.
The seemingly incongruous title So Long at the Fair is a reference to a British folk song (obscure in America) in which the missing "Johnny" (the character name of Simmons' brother) has overstayed at the fair.