I have a ton of noir, but Lady On A Train is the first noir comedy I have seen. That is a bizarre sub-genre, and this movie only operates alternately as noir or comedy, without really mixing the two. It’s almost like one movie was crudely grafted onto another–with a third movie, a musical, worked in as well.
The most successful merger of noir and comedy occurs in the opening scene, where Deanna Durbin at first seems to be in peril, only for it be revealed she is reading from a mystery. But when the train makes a brief stop, she happens to see a murder occur in a building’s window directly across from her train compartment.
Once she’s disembarked, the movie becomes pure screwball comedy. Turns out Durbin is a clever but scatterbrained heiress. Her foil is Edward Everett Horton, played her harried chaperone, the kind of role he excelled at so often in his long career.
Unfortunately, Horton isn’t in the movie for long, as Durbin escapes her hotel room, driven to solve the mystery of the murder she witnessed. When the police won’t listen to her, she enlists the help of a mystery writer.
When I say she “enlists” his help, she actually deceives him into coming to her apartment late at night, the first of many such selfish actions that left me cold. She’s supposed to be our protagonist but, once she starts intentionally wedging herself between the writer and his fiancée, I started rooting against her.
Even worse, Durbin has three songs in the movie. I love the song “Night and Day”, and what she does do it should have resulted in felony charges. And yet that doesn’t hold a candle to the lusty version of “Silent Night” she sings over the phone to “daddy”, at his insistence—while she’s lying in bed. So many showers later, and I still don’t feel clean yet.
This is the first time I have seen Durbin in a movie, and I wasn’t impressed. But much of the supporting cast is composed of actors I love seeing in films. One of those is Dan Duryea and he has the best line in the movie: when introducing Durbin to a room of elderly people he says, “Don’t worry, they won’t bite. I don’t think there’s a decent set of teeth in the room”. There, now you know the best line in the movie, and you don’t have to watch this.
Dir: Charles David
Starring Deanna Durbin, Ralph Bellamy, Dan Duryea, Edward Everett Horton
Watched on blu-ray