When you start to watch a 1945 black-and-white movie called Lady on a Train you have certain expectations, especially when you're told in advance that it's about a woman who sees a murder take place from a train window. And when the movie features such noir stalwarts as Dan Duryea and Ralph Bellamy. And especially when the title of the movie evokes The Lady Vanishes and Lady in the Lake and Strangers on a Train. But Lady on a Train is not what you might think it's going to be; in fact, it's a film that never has a clue about what it is or wants to be. It's an unsatisfying hodgepodge.
There are some films that are so bad that they become fascinating for sheer awfulness. Lady on a Train is that kind of awful. It starts out noir-y and offers, intermittently, fistfights and mistaken identities and shadows, lots of shadows, and enough red herrings to feed cast and crew for the entire time the film was in production. But it also takes a shot at comedy — not sophisticated banter but broad farce: in one scene, trying to hide herself from a hired gunsel, the heroine disguises herself as a chair and moves around from place to place just as she would in an Abbott and Costello vehicle. And then, if farce/noir weren't enough of a burden, at three separate times during the events, with the least possible justification, Deanna Durbin, playing at being a detective, breaks into song, but only because she's Deanna Durbin, not because the film requires her to do so. So it's a noir-farce-sentimental musical. It just don't work, except for connoisseurs of badness.
Plus it features two of the ugliest hats ever to come out of the Hollywood chapeau-shop:
After making this film (and another clunker) Deanna Durbin left Hollywood, where she had been the highest paid woman in America, married and moved to France, never appeared on stage or on film again — and reassumed her birthname, Edna Mae Durbin. It's a decision one can respect.
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