Lady on a Train (1945)

Lady on a Train (1945) is the first in our Deanna Durbin Christmas movie twin-pack (come back next week), but though it has a noir title and features a murder mystery, it is decidedly not a noir movie, unlike Christmas Holiday of the previous year, which did not have a noir title but was noir as heck.

Got it?

Just to throw us another curveball, Deanna’s a blonde in this one.  How do they expect us to keep up?

This post is part of the countdown to Christmas coinciding with the launch of my newest book, Christmas in Classic Films.

Keeping up with Miss Durbin is a challenge for everyone in this movie, as she breezes through the screwball scenarios like the madcap heiress she is, and has a bit of comic relief to help her: the wonderfully befuddled Edward Everett Horton as the head of her father’s New York business office, “Haskell of the New York Office” as he proudly identifies himself. When Deanna arrives from California to spend Christmas with her aunt, whom we never see, Mr. Horton is charged with taking charge of her.  Fat chance.

The action charges off the blocks from the beginning: on a train pulling into Grand Central, Miss Durbin glances up from the mystery novel she is reading to see a murder committed in the window of one of the brick buildings that border the railroad line into the city.  When our old pal William Frawley, who plays the desk sergeant, gingerly decorating a tiny Christmas tree at the local station house, refuses to believe her, she tries to enlist the help of the writer of the mystery story she had been reading.  He is played by David Bruce, who had a minor role in Christmas Holiday.

Mr. Bruce is a little wacky himself, a self-absorbed, constantly distracted writer with a glib and perennially unimpressed secretary played by Jacqueline deWitt, and a jealous society dame fiancée played by Patricia Morison.

Following him to a newsreel theater (yes, there were such things), the pesky Miss Durbin suddenly discovers the identity of the man who was murdered—a wealthy scion who lived in seclusion on Long Island and is reported to have died by falling off a stepladder while decorating his Christmas tree.  (I know this isn’t a noir, but have you ever heard of anything so un-Christmas-y?)  Deanna knows this isn’t so; his body must have been dragged back to his mansion.  She is more determined than ever to follow the mystery, whether she gets anyone to help her or not.

Playing Nancy Drew, she sneaks out to the mansion, arriving in time for the reading of the will.  Elizabeth Patterson is the old auntie, the disapproving and controlling family matriarch. The family mistakes Deanna for a nightclub singer whom the rascally old man was dating, and are worried she’s there for her piece of the pie.  All are surprised that the nightclub singer has inherited everything.

Wonderfully goofy/smarmy Dan Duryea is one nephew and stalwart Ralph Bellamy is his brother.  There is sneaking around the house to explore for clues, a clever sight gag where she pretends to be a covered-up chair to escape groundskeeper Allen Jenkins, who is truly sinister in this movie.  She finds the old man’s slippers with blood on them, knowing he was killed wearing them.  A clue!  Proof she can show to the police!  She steals the slippers, but sinister George Coulouris, a nightclub owner who has caught on to her, sends Mr. Jenkins after her to get back those slippers.  Mr. Coulouris constantly carries around a limp white cat which he continually pets.  It doesn’t seem like an affectionate act; more like a nervous habit.

Wait a minute, time for a spot of Christmas.  There is a large tree in Miss Durbin’s hotel suite (a tree in everyone’s suite, apartment, mansion, office, etc.), and she sings “Silent Night” over the telephone to her father in California, a leisurely loving version while she is lying on her bed.  In the other room, Allen Jenkins is waiting to kill her for the slippers.

The movie is really a lot of fun, and it is stunning that the fast-paced screwball aspect of the plot is balanced by a very suspenseful mystery.  Danger lurks at every turn, and the tension ratchets up in odd moments.  We get a big laugh at a clever line, and then a bit of a fright.

Deanna gets trapped into pretending she’s actually the nightclub singer she said she was at the theme nightclub “The Circus.”  There is a clever bit with a two-way mirror which Durbin will later have to smash to escape.  Caught into performing when Dan Duryea shows up, along with the rest of his dour family, as well as the hapless befuddled writer and his snooty fiancée, Durbin sings, “Give Me a Little Kiss” in a low, sultry manner.  She teases and flirts with male customers, including the writer, boldly infuriating Patricia Morison.  Deanna almost accidently starts to fall for the writer, and he is stunned to find himself captivated by her. David Bruce is very likeable in the role and after a while, becomes her partner and protector in the search for the murderer, and he actually seems to be a pretty good detective, for a mystery writer.  He certainly gets beat up enough to be a real detective.

On Christmas Eve, among the nightclub hijinks there is a keepaway game with the slippers and the fast-moving plot stops long enough again for Deanna to sing “Night and Day,” this time in her upper register, unleashing a bit of her operatic chops.  Beautiful camera work lovingly follows her, and when she locks eyes with David Bruce, we know she is seducing him.  It’s not teasing now, she really wants this man.

Because her singing in this movie is at realistic moments, i.e., in a nightclub or to her father as a Christmas greeting over the phone, the film doesn’t have that launching-into-song-for-no-reason feeling of a musical.

We end up in the writer’s apartment, where Deanna is hiding out from the bad guys chasing her.  She is in his bed wearing his jammies, while he’s on the couch.  When Miss Durbin wakes, she fondly gazes at the snoring Mr. Bruce and asks his secretary, “Does he always snore like that?”

The secretary, deadpan, responds, “I am his secretary.” 

The ever-capable secretary serenely and with no end of humor attempts to cover for them when Haskell of the New York Office shows up.  She puts his robe over her clothes and says “Good morning, darling.”

That secretary’s a good egg.

It’s Christmas Day and after another melee, they end up in jail, but Dan Duryea bails her out.  Hmm, not sure that’s a good idea.  Is she safe with him?  Mr. Bellamy comes to bail her out, too. She sees a newsboy with the headlines showing the real nightclub singer was murdered.

Somebody in the old man’s family doesn’t want to share the inheritance. 

Duryea takes Durbin to the company warehouse—where the old man was murdered.  It occurs to her that he killed him.  Luckily, Ralph Bellamy shows up and they fight. Very cleverly, we are taken into the room where the murder was committed, the suspense builds and the screwball comedy is frittered away like a dying laugh.   A light shines from a suddenly passing train.

Deanna is in danger.  One of the brothers is the murderer, and she is trapped.  David Bruce finally shows up, almost bungles things, but luckily, has brought the police with him.

Cut to another train compartment, with Deanna reading another beloved mystery book, but this time, the writer is sitting across from her, in his jammies, wishing she would finish.  The soundtrack bleeding away from the rhythmic thunder of train wheels to a few cords of “The Wedding March” tells us they are married and on their honeymoon.  Impatient, he blurts out the name of the murderer to her, spoiling the story.  Her annoyance fades as the penny drops, and she rings for the porter to make up their berth.

Lady on a Train is not the acting challenge for Deanna Durbin that Christmas Holiday was the year before (which we're going to have a look at next week), but she gets to show that she was brilliant in comedy.  She clearly had a sense of the absurd. A strikingly beautiful young woman, with certainly a lovely singing voice, Durbin could have rested on those laurels alone, but fortunately for us, she, or someone at the studio, was willing to attempt more.

Christmastime was the setting of the story, but Christmas was not necessary to the telling of the story, which in turn, had no message of yuletide sentiment.  It was released in August 1945, so even cashing in as a Christmastime movie was not the point.  Beyond just about every room having a tree, we might not even remember it is Christmas Eve and Christmas Day.

Deanna Durbin doesn’t seem to recall it either; Haskell of the New York Office does her shopping for her.

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Come back next week for another tale with Deanna Durbin in Christmas Holiday (1944)!  It's a film noir Christmas.

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Jacqueline T. Lynch is the author of Ann Blyth: Actress. Singer. Star. and Movies in Our Time - Hollywood Mirrors and Mimics the Twentieth Century and Hollywood Fights Fascism.  Her latest book is Christmas in Classic Films. TO JOIN HER READERS' GROUP - follow this link for a free book as a thank-you for joining.

Sing and Like It - 1934

Sing and Like It (1934) is one of the best examples of parody in an era probably remembered more for melodrama, serious social commentary, gangster flicks, and the beginning of the Production Code. A few Busby Berkeley chorus numbers may have turned our heads with either suggestiveness or silliness, but most movies of the day were products of an industry that took itself pretty seriously. In Sing and Like It, we see a movie of unexpected sophistication in the way it gently mocks the movies’ most treasured lead characters.

The wonderful ZaSu Pitts heads the cast of players all who parody some type or other.  Directed by William A. Seiter, the movie blends a gangster theme with the world of theater, tackled with tongue-in-cheek silliness. It is not the kind of very demonstrative humor that tries too hard to be funny, not screwball or slapstick (although there are some elements of this as well). It’s wry rather than witty, personified in the way ZaSu Pitts plays her role, Annie Snodgrass, a bank teller who, after work is the leading lady of the Union Bank Little Theater Players.

She of the Olive Oyl demeanor takes herself utterly seriously. She casts her large eyes to the heavens, wrings her fluttery hands, and declares her passion for the art of acting.

“No woman that has known the triumph that I knew when I played Lady Windermere’s Fan in the Fall River High School Senior Play can ever get theatre out of her blood.”

First of all, what a choice for a high school play.

ZaSu is self-absorbed in a way that is more serene than obnoxious. No one can puncture her dream world or rattle her self confidence. She is sweet, and pathetic, blissfully unaware of how untalented she is, and we love her for it, perhaps even envying her peace of mind.

John Qualen, that terrific character actor we once discussed here, plays her shy, but devoted fiancé. He wants to take her away from the sordidness of life as an actress in the Union Bank Little Theater Players (I love that name). He plans a quiet life growing tomatoes.

But, she must see her dream through, first. She gets help from an unlikely source.

Nat Pendleton plays a mobster, who is about to rob the said Union Bank with his gang, which includes the cigar-chomping sarcastic Ned Sparks. Sparks also serves as Pendleton’s interpreter when the less than eloquent mob boss needs an explanation. “He says ‘Nerts!’”

Just as they are about to blow the vault in the bank, they hear rehearsal going on, and ZaSu singing her song about mother love. She gives it her all in that anemic manner (and sings the song several times in the movie, so you’ll have it down pat by the end).

Pendleton listens, and tears form in his eyes and roll down his mobster cheeks. Da song is jus’ be-oo-ti-ful.

He decides the world must hear this voice and this song. He threatens theatrical producer Edward Everett Horton to put ZaSu in the lead of his newest production. Or else.

Mr. Horton is not his usual squirming, befuddled and helpless creature here. He’s fed up, angry, and barks at people. He is used to being in control. A theatrical producer with numerous photos of stars on his office wall, but a photo of himself on his desk.

Meanwhile, Pendleton’s moll, played by Pert Kelton, also has designs on the stage, but he refuses to allow her a career. He places ZaSu in her care, and the jealous Miss Kelton would like to scratch her eyes out for getting the opportunity she wants.

If you’ve only seen an older Pert Kelton in The Music Man (1962) as the Widow Paroo, tossing around her lusty Irish accent while little lisping Ronny Howard spits at her, you may find her sexy, other-side-of-the-tracks routine here as quite a shock. And funny as heck.

She tosses verbal hand grenades to ZaSu, but is ineffectual against the protective wall of ZaSu’s own marvelous stupidity. ZaSu imagines that Pert is jealous of her beauty and talent, fearful of having the gangster boyfriend lured away. ZaSu is a parody of the worldly actress.

“If I were an ordinary woman, I wouldn’t come between you, but I am an actress and I must…I’ll try not to lead him so far away that he cannot find his way home. Try not to hate me too much.”

Pert sees the only way to communicate with ZaSu is to join her in her fantasyland. She delivers the capitulation ZaSu expects in a flat voice and a kind of sarcasm ZaSu will never understand, “You’re a voluptuous siren and an artist, but deep underneath somewhere, I know there’s a good woman. Yes, Annie, I understand.”

This movie must have been such fun to do. There are a lot of very wry, funny lines, a little racy here and there, and bits of business, that it takes at least a couple of viewings to catch it all.

Pert Kelton gets herself appointed ZaSu’s understudy, and of course tries to do her in, finally resulting to kidnapping. John Qualen is a faithful, stubborn swain, and Pendleton has a heart underneath the gun in his inside coat pocket.

To ensure his leading lady is a success (in a play that has been rewritten by one of his goons who thinks he’s funny), Pendleton has his boys threaten the town’s leading theatre critic with a gun during the performance, making him laugh in all the right places.

Except for ZaSu’s mother song, which leaves the gangster sobbing once again.

When the performance is over and ZaSu is the toast of the town, she feels obligated to the gangster, and as perfunctorily as if she were paying a bill announces to the mobster, “Come take me, I am yours.”

He is shocked in a rather Puritan, un-gangster-like way. “I ain’t that kind of heel. What I done was for art!”

Some cute bits include Pendleton’s complaining of Pert Kelton always chewing gum and leaving her old gum stuck all over the place. Once she kisses him and he is startled to find her gum transferred to his mouth. At the end of the film when he makes up with her (after a couple of un-PC but very funny black eyes he has given her), he takes out a stick of gum, breaks it in half for them to share. He pops hers into her mouth.

They’re all having fun with “types,” teasing the way the movie industry usually presented these types. Good parody always has a ring of truth to it.

It is purely a matter of coincidence, I’m sure, that Miss Pitts’ character’s home town of Fall River (Massachusetts), established its own little theater two years after this movie was made, in 1936. The Little Theater of Fall River is still going strong, even without the help of ZaSu’s warbling of “Your Mother”.

The Gay Divorcee (1934)

Fred Astaire reprises his Broadway role in “The Gay Divorcée” (1934) as a rascally hoofer, who in this film wanders among night clubbers in Paris and London with his pal Edward Everett Horton, falls in love with an uninterested Ginger Rogers and spends most of the film trying to get her interested.

Ginger has her own predicament, stuck in a loveless marriage and turning to lawyer Horton to arrange a divorce. Mr. Horton arranges for her to be caught with a hired professional corespondent in order that her husband might be enraged into divorcing her.

Edward Everett Horton, who always seems somewhat like an upper class Gomer Pyle, has some fun scenes as a bumbling second banana, and even gets to sing and caper a bit with a young Betty Grable in the “Let’s Knock Knees” number. Alice Brady is the scatterbrained man-chasing aunt of Ginger who gets some good lines, and Erik Rhodes, who, like Fred Astaire, reprises his Broadway role as Rudolfo Tonetti, a gloriously absurd professional homewrecker and operatic tenor.

It is difficult to listen to the wonderfully precise intonations of Mr. Horton without being reminded of his narration of the “Fractured Fairy Tales” on “Rocky and Bullwinkle.”

Though some smart aleck remarks by just about everybody keep the comic ball rolling, the film is a bit slow moving, particular at the beginning, and we see right off in the “Looking for a Needle in a Haystack” number an early example of Mr. Astaire’s agility and inventiveness in dancing all over furniture. The film is a time capsule of 1934, with platinum blondes with short, bouncy curls, bathing suits with belts, pleated trousers, architecture held together with chrome and black lacquer, and enough Art Deco accoutrements to choke a horse.

They end up at a seaside resort where the meridian lines painted on the shiny floor of an outdoor courtyard/dance floor are intended to give the set some depth. Here Ginger and the pseudo-suave Tonetti are to engage in a pretend tryst. No fear for Ginger, as Tonetti proudly exclaims his motto, “Your wife is safe with Tonetti. He prefers spaghetti.”

But Fred intervenes and there is a case of mistaken identity when Ginger thinks he is the hired corespondent. Ginger changes into a negligee with more doodads on it than a drum majorette’s costume, and Tonetti eventually arrives with his concertina and, all business, slips into a smoking jacket, the standard uniform of roués.

The big production number here is “The Continental,” which won the Academy Award for Best Music and Best Original Song. It is a very long staged number, where after Fred and Ginger get their turn, an army of dancers flows onto the set like locusts in an assortment of black and white evening attire. They form geometric patterns and eventually become increasingly acrobatic, like a Superbowl halftime show.

Eric Blore, in his typical oily, comic, but clever servant’s role, comes inadvertently to the rescue and Fred and Ginger leave us with another waltz over the furniture in her suite. It was their second of ten films together, and by now the pattern was as set as their remarkably precise and impeccably structured dancing.

Here is a bit of Fred and Ginger dancing “The Continental.”