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This is the last movie review for 1938 to appear here. Unless I am mistaken it is number twelve. I have tried to include all the big commercial successes and Oscar winners of the year plus others that have earned lasting reputations. Four of them have in common being stage plays converted to film (“Angels with Dirty Faces”, “You Can’t Take it With You”, “Holiday,” “Pygmalion”). There were a few costume dramas (“Marie Antoinette”, “Adventures of Robin Hood”, “Jezebel”). There was one musical (“Alexander’s Ragtime Band”) and one in a sort of exotic, foreign adventure category of its own (“Algiers”). “Algiers” was a remake of a French movie named “Pepe Le Moko.” One – a huge commercial success – would qualify as a feature-length sitcom today (“Love Finds Andy Hardy”). That leaves “Boys Town,” which, along with “Angels with Dirty Faces,” has a sort of social justice consciousness-raising aspect to it. And of course today’s Christmas fantasy morality play. Those of us watching the development of the worldwide crisis that would become the Second World War can conclude that the American public was not particularly concerned about it yet. At least not concerned enough for it to be deemed marketable by Hollywood. I did watch one British film from 1938 set in Europe. That was “The Lady Vanishes,” directed by Alfred Hitchcock. (The U.S. release date was November 1. I don’t know if the Times passed on reviewing it or I just overlooked it.) “The Lady Vanishes” is set on a train in an unidentified Nordic country on which the British heroes and heroine hope to make it to safety across the border of another unnamed country. The bad guys resemble SS officers without insignia. For Europeans imminent war was an attention getter. In this country no doubt folks were too concerned with putting food on the table and keeping a roof overhead to worry about events across the nice, wide oceans.