Lady on a Train (Universal, 1945)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2020 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night Charles and I watched a run of three more or less noir movies with more or less connections to Christmas on Turner Classic Movies. The first was Lady on a Train, a 1945 movie from Universal reflecting their attempts to keep Deanna Durbin popular as she’d grown into adulthood and the determined manipulativeness with which she’d acted as a teenager -- always on a demented quest, usually either to reunite her divorced parents or, if one of her parents had died, to find the other a suitable replacement mate -- didn’t come off so well from a grown woman. One of the curious things about Durbin at Universal versus Judy Garland at MGM (their two careers are tied in an odd way because the two co-starred in the 1936 MGM musical short Every Sunday and they paralleled each other’s rises to popularity as teen stars) was that while MGM was plunking Judy into one big, overstuffed period musical after another Universal was casting Durbin quite creatively. In 1942 they had hired the French expatriate Jean Renoir to direct her in The Amazing Mrs. Halliday, a story about a war widow smuggling orphans out of China to the U.S. (and according to Durbin’s correspondence with film historian William K. Everson, Renoir actually shot two-thirds of the finally released version even though Bruce Manning, usually a writer, got sole credit). In 1944 they put Durbin into a film called Christmas Holiday and borrowed Gene Kelly from MGM to be her co-star -- but your expectation that a film called Christmas Holiday co-starring Deanna Durbin and Gene Kelly would be a bright, happy, sprightly musical would be dashed in a hurry. Instead it was an all-out film noir, directed by Robert Siodmak (in the middle of his run of classic noirs including Phantom Lady, The Killers, The Spiral Staircase and Criss Cross) and cast Kelly as the gangster Durbin married, then broke up with, who came back in her life to kill her for revenge.

Durbin’s next film after Christmas Holiday was Can’t Help Singing, which was more like the stuff MGM was giving Garland -- a musical about Western pioneers (let’s face it, after the smash 1943 stage success of Richard Rodgers’ and Oscar Hammerstein’s Oklahoma! musicals about pioneers were “in”) that was Durbin’s only film in color, for which Universal’s makeup and hair department turned her from dark-haired to blonde. They kept her blonde for Lady on a Train, which turned out to be a combination of mystery thriller, screwball comedy and what I call a “monomusical” (i.e., one in which only one cast member sings). I first heard of Lady on a Train from William K. Everson’s The Detective in Film, in which he gave it a rave review even though he acknowledged the film’s big flaw: “It was a throwback to the gaily lunatic comedy of the 1930’s -- the mixing of madcap murder and cocktails, as in The Thin Man and Remember Last Night? At this point in the 1940’s, murder was being taken very seriously in all the tough and violent crime/private eye melodramas with Bogart, Ladd, Raft et al. Even so, it’s such a lavish and entertaining frolic it’s hard to see why it failed, especially as .. it succeeds both as comedy and thriller.”

Lady on a Train began as a story idea by Leslie Charteris, creator of The Saint series, though Edmund Beloin and Robert O’Brien did the actual screenplay, and the director was a French expatriate named Charles David. He has only two directorial credits listed on imdb.com either in the U.S.or in France -- where he returned in 1950 with Durbin as his bride (she was drawn to older intellectual men and had fallen in love with David while making this film, but he insisted as a condition of marrying her that she give up show business, so she retired permanently after her contract with Universal ran out in 1948, married David in 1950 and lived with him in France until his death in 1999, then stayed there until she died in 2013) -- but his work here is quite good. He ably mixes the comedy and thriller elements of the story, even though the attempt to revive Durbin’s busybody character from her films as a teenager sits oddly and doesn’t quite work the way David and the writers clearly expected it to. The basic plot is a quite engaging one: Durbin plays San Francisco socialite Nikki Collins, who as the film opens is on the final leg of a train journey to New York to spend the Christmas holidays with her uncle. While she’s on the train it comes to a stop long enough for her to look through a window and see an older man being threatened by a younger one, who holds a crowbar over him and is about to clobber him with it when he notices there’s a witness on the train and he draws the window shade. But Nikki can still see the two figures as silhouettes on the shade and she notices the one clubbing the other to death.

Only when her train finally arrives in New York -- where she’s met by fussy busybody Haskell (Edward Everett Horton, as prissy as he was in his supporting roles in Fred Astaire-Ginger Rogers films) of “the New York office” until she successfully eludes him -- she can’t get anyone to believe she’s actually witnessed a murder: not Haskell and not the police, either. One reason she can’t get anyone to believe her is she’s a huge fan of murder mysteries -- our first shot of her was her on the train reading a work by popular thriller writer Wayne Morgan (David Bruce) called The Case of the Headless Bride -- and when the cop she tries to report the crime to sarcastically suggests she seek out Wayne Morgan and get him to solve the crime for her, she does exactly that. At first Wayne is irritated at seeing her turn up in his apartment -- especially since his secretary and girlfriend Joyce Williams (Patricia Morison, wasted as usual in her Hollywood career in a role too small for her in both duration and importance) immediately jumps to the wrong conclusion and thinks she and Wayne are having an affair. Nikki follows Wayne and Joyce to a movie theatre where they’re running a newsreel of a fashion show Joyce was in -- and as part of the newsreel Nikki sees a story about the death of a major industrialist, Josiah Waring (Thurston Hall), and recognizes him as the victim she saw being murdered even though the official cause of his death is he fell off a ladder while hanging Christmas decorations.

There’s a scene in which Josiah Waring’s will is being read and we find that he hated his nephews Jonathan (Ralph Bellamy) and Arnold (Dan Duryea) so much he left them $1 each and gave the bulk of his fortune to his mistress, Margo Martin (Maria Palmer), singer at the Circus nightclub. Nikki ends up impersonating Margo at the Circus, going on in her place and singing quite effectively on two pop songs, the O.K. novelty “Give Me a Little Kiss, Will Ya, Huh?” by Roy Turk, Jack Smith and Maceo Pinkard and Cole Porter’s masterpiece “Night and Day.” (Earlier in the movie Durbin also sings “Silent Night” over the phone to her mother in San Francisco.) Durbin proves to be a quite good torch singer (as she had introducing Frank Loesser’s “Spring Will Be a Little Late This Year” in Christmas Holiday), lowering her register from the one she used in singing opera and semi-classics and projecting a powerful world-weariness; and Woody Bredell’s superb cinematography creates a marvelously Sternbergian effect during Durbin’s “Night and Day” and supports the whole film with great noir atmospherics somewhat at odd with the film’s trivial content.

I’m not sure Lady on a Train is as good as William Everson said it was -- certainly Christmas Holiday is an even better movie as well as a far more dramatic transformation in Durbin’s image -- but it’s still an engaging comedy-thriller that’s been all too neglected by film historians and buffs alike. (But then that’s true of virtually all Durbin’s movies; like Shirley Temple, she got out of show business altogether and lived a long and happy life out of the limelight -- which seems to be the only way a child star can hope to have a sane adult life afterwards -- but what was good for Durbin’s health and sanity was lousy for her reputation and she remains virtually forgotten today.) The climax takes place as Nikki is taken to the Waring factory, where she realizes she’s being held in the very room where the murder she watched took place -- and David and the writers at first point the finger of suspicion at Arnold, the twitchy brother, before Jonathan turns out to be the real killer and to go off the rails in a psychotic episode beautifully played by Bellamy -- a far finer actor than his reputation, even though (as Everson conceded) he was so often cast as a murderer (where he wasn’t the second lead losing the girl to the lead or the detective he occasionally played himself) that audiences who only cared whodunit and not why or how could leave the theatre early, confident that Hollywood’s typecasting system would not let them down.