Lady on a Train (1945)

Lady on a Train is a 1945 Universal release included in Kino Lorber’s Blu-Ray boxed set Film Noir: The Dark Side of Cinema IX. Now I really don’t mind that hardly any of the Blu-Ray film noir releases these days are genuine noir. I understand that it’s a marketing thing. Slapping a film noir label on a movie makes it a viable physical media release and as a result lots of unfairly neglected movies are now seeing the light of day. That’s a good thing.

But the sheer brazenness of trying to pass off Lady on a Train as a film noir is awe-inspiring. This movie is not noir. It’s not noirish or noiresque or noir-adjacent. It does not contain even trace elements of noirness.

Lady on a Train is a lighthearted comic murder mystery with a decided screwball comedy flavour. It’s also a rather delightful movie in its own way.

It was based on a Leslie Charteris story and if you’re a fan of Charteris’s Saint stories you know that he was all about clever plotting, style, wit and fun. And this movie contains all those ingredients.

Deanna Durbin plays Nikki Collins and she is most certainly a screwball. She’s on a train and she’s reading a murder mystery by her favourite writer of detective stories, Wayne Morgan. She spends a great deal of time reading detective stories. She looks up from her book, out the window of the train, and she witnesses an actual murder. It’s not her overheated imagination.

The problem is that the police assume she’s a ditzy blonde who reads too much detective fiction and they don’t believe her.

She decides she’s going to need some help from a real expert, and surely no-one knows more about murder than Wayne Morgan. The writer is naturally flattered by the admiration of a cute blonde but his girlfriend, fashion model Joyce Willams (Patricia Morison), is less happy about pretty blondes taking an interest in her man. In fact she’s very disgruntled indeed.

Nikki does have a lead. She is sure that the murder victim was a wealthy industrialist named Josiah Waring. He is indeed deceased, although his demise has been attributed to a freak accident with a Christmas tree.

Waring left an odd will. His two nephews, Arnold Waring (Dan Duryea) and Jonathan Waring (Ralph Bellamy), were left nothing. The entire vast fortune went to Waring’s mistress, nightclub chanteuse Margo Martin (Maria Palmer).

There are plenty of other dissatisfied would-be heirs so there’s no shortage of potential suspects for murder.

There's a solid mystery plot but the emphasis is on lighthearted fun, and on watching Nikki’s attempts to play the part of an ace girl amateur detective. Her attempts turn up some clues but cause a good deal of amusing mayhem. She has a knack for blundering into situations with all the overconfidence of an enthusiastic schoolgirl.

The part is tailor-made for Deanna Durbin. She gets to be feisty, smart, accident-prone, cute and adorable. All things that she did supremely well. Her likeability factor is high enough to keep us interested in her adventures.

Naturally she has to sing and since for much of the movie she’s pretending to be a nightclub singer the songs slot neatly into the film and they’re pretty good. When she sings Night and Day she’s as close as Deanna Durbin ever got to being sultry. And she does a very sexy version of Silent Night. Yes I know that sounds bizarre but she manages it.

You might think that Dan Duryea’s presence in the cast would add some noirness but Duryea displays little of his trademark sinister presence. He’s very good, but he’s not playing a heavy.

You just have to accept that this is not going to be a film noir, and enjoy it for what it is. It’s a decently plotted murder mystery combined with a screwball comedy. Nikki is totally a screwball comedy female protagonist and Wayne Morgan is a classic screwball comedy male protagonist. Initially she drives him insane and threatens to reduce his well-ordered life to a shambles. You know that eventually they’ll realise that since they’re both screwballs they might as fall in love.

The Circus Club (where Margo is the headliner) makes a fine visually interesting setting for much of the later action. Durbin gets to wear some very fetching costumes.

The murder mystery and screwball comedy elements are nicely balanced. The mystery plot works satisfactorily, the screwball comedy elements are genuinely amusing. And Deanna Durbin’s sparkling performance is the main attraction. A charming and delightful movie, highly recommended.

The Kino Lorber Blu-Ray offers a very nice transfer. There is no audio commentary, and given the very dubious quality of most of the audio commentaries that Kino Lorber offer that’s probably a blessing.

Three Smart Girls (1936)

The comedy-musical-romance Three Smart Girls, released in 1936, launched Deanna Durbin’s career. Since Deanna Durbin pretty much kept Universal Studios afloat for the next decade you could argue that this movie in effect saved the studio. 

Durbin was just fourteen at the time she made this movie. Universal weren’t quite sure that an unknown and untried fourteen-year-old girl could carry a movie on her own so she is in fact one of the three female leads, the three smart girls of the title. Durbin immediately proved that the studio needn’t have worried. Her star quality is obvious. Star quality is of course incredibly important but if an actress has that other intangible quality, likeability, it’s even better. And Deanna Durbin had plenty of likeability.

The three smart girls are Joan (Nan Grey), Kay (Barbara Read) and Penny (Durbin). They  are sisters and they live with their mother Dorothy. Ten years after her divorce Dorothy Craig still carries a torch for their father. Now the news that she has been dreading has arrived. Her ex-husband, Judson Craig (Charles Winninger), is about to remarry. He is going to marry a woman named Donna Lyons (Binnie Barnes). The three sisters decide that they must do something about this so they set off for New York to save Daddy from the clutches of the wicked adventuress Donna.

Of course Judson Craig has no wish to be saved. He’s a middle-aged man who is about to snare himself a glamorous much younger bride and that’s not something most middle-aged men want to be saved from.

As you might expect, the three girls cook up a scheme to throw a spanner into Donna’s wedding plans. At the same time Donna and her mother are scheming to get the three girls out of New York and out of their way.

The sisters have an ally in Judson Craig’s business manager Bill Evans and Evans comes up with what seems like the perfect solution - to set Donna up with a rich Hungarian, Count Arisztid (Mischa Auer). Being a gold-digger Donna is sure to chose a dashing nobleman with money over the middle-aged Judson Craig. There’s no need to tell Donna that the count is actually a penniless drunk. Complications ensue when Lord Michael Stuart (Ray Milland), who owns half of Australia, gets unwittingly mixed up in events.

This was the first of many Hollywood successes for director Henry Koster among which were quite a few more Deanna Durbin pictures including the delightful First Love.

Deanna Durbin was a very big star indeed, in fact she was at one time the highest paid star in Hollywood, but she hasn’t retained the kind of following among classic movie fans that you might expect. She’s not quite forgotten, but almost so. This may have something to do with her singing. Not that there’s anything wrong with. She was a great singer. But she was a proper soprano and her style of singing is probably a lot less accessible to modern audiences than the more familiar jazz/swing style of the 40s. It’s a pity because she really was a great star. She was a very competent actress (who could handle serious rôles on the rare occasions they were offered to her), she was very good at light comedy and she was thoroughly charming. Her performance here is just right. She’s a bit precocious, but not irritatingly so. She’s funny and she’s sweet.

Nan Grey (an underrated actress whose career was sadly short-lived) is very good as Joan. Charles Winninger is amusing as poor Judson Craig, surrounded by women whose machinations leave him perplexed. Binnie Barnes is also excellent as the scheming gold-digger Donna. Ray Milland is in splendid form as well.

We naturally get several songs from Durbin. Three Smart Girls is however mostly a comedy-romance and it is genuinely very amusing. I can’t really think of anything negative to say about this movie - it does everything it sets out to do and does so effortlessly and charmingly. It has a very strong cast, the script has all the standard complications you’d expect but it’s all very expertly executed.

This is the fourth Deanna Durbin movie I’ve seen and I’ve liked them all. I guess that makes me a confirmed Durbin fan.

Three Smart Girls is highly recommended.