OVP: Lady on a Train (1945)

Film: Lady on a Train (1945)

Stars: Deanna Durbin, Ralph Bellamy, David Bruce, George Coulouris, Dan Duryea

Director: Charles David

Oscar History: 1 nomination (Best Sound)

Snap Judgment Ranking: 4/5 stars

Getting older in Hollywood is never easy for child stars.  There is practically a cottage industry just focusing on how child stars in film & television end up broke, addicted to drugs, & dying young.  It's considered bizarre when stars like Patty Duke or Jonathan Taylor Thomas end up normal, and more impressive when they end up like Natalie Wood or Jodie Foster, proper stars into their adulthood.  Deanna Durbin only truly managed half of that equation.  Durbin was not a star like Judy Garland (a peer of hers) who ended up struggling with a difficult personal life & issues with drug/alcohol abuse until her death in the sense that she couldn't handle adulthood.  But she was someone who never properly got to grow up as an actress, and eventually that caused her to quit show business.  One of the turning points in Durbin's career was Lady on a Train, which was one of several pictures made by Universal at the time that tried to get Durbin out from under her squeaky-clean teenage persona.

(Spoilers Ahead) The movie is a comedy, but it reads on paper as a thriller, which it is to some degree.  Durbin plays Nikki Collins, an heiress on her way to New York City to visit her aunt.  While on the way, she spots a murder occurring from her train window.  The police don't believe her when she says the murder occurred, so she tracks down Wayne Morgan (Bruce), a famed mystery novelist whom she begrudgingly convinces to help her with the case.  As it turns out, she was not imagining things, and through a case of mistaken identity (where she's confused with a gold-digging lounge singer), she & Wayne find the killer and fall in love in the process.

The film is super cute and quite twisty with a great premise.  None other than Agatha Christie herself would borrow elements of this plot in 1957's 4.50 from Paddington (I couldn't find if this was a coincidence or a "coincidence" in looking up more about Christie's novel, which was called What Mrs. McGillicuddy Saw if you're in the States & read this as a teenager like I did).  I haven't seen any of Durbin's work as a teenager, so I didn't go into this with any preconceived ideas about her, but while she's a little too adorable for someone who ends up a bride at the end of the picture, I liked her.  She has pluck, and great chemistry with pretty much every guy onscreen, though the men feel interchangeable (only Dan Duryea, eternal scene-stealer, stood out for me).

Durbin's career continued to slide here as while the plot was influential on later mystery novels/films (and also, it's a good movie), it wasn't a big enough hit to justify Durbin's payday at the time (she was purportedly the highest-paid woman in the United States at one point), and audiences refused to allow her to grow-up.  Even with a few musical numbers (that feel out-of-place to Durbin's character, but sound great...the nomination is totally worth it for Durbin's "Night and Day" alone), they didn't want to see America's sweetheart married & solving crimes.

Durbin would be make five more films after this, but in 1950 (after marrying her director here Charles David) she retreated to the French countryside to raise a family, and never looked back.  Despite repeated attempts to get Durbin to return to the screen or stage, she refused, and only granted one interview in 1983.  She was critical of the studio system, and loathed her last three pictures, and little is known about her later life as she was so private.