Lady on a Train
Directed by Charles DavidOn a train pulling into New York on Christmas Eve, Nikki Collins, a wealthy San Francisco socialite with a taste for detective fiction, witnesses a murder through the window of a passing mansion. The victim, she will learn, is Josiah Waring, patriarch of a prominent and fractious family. When Nikki reports what she saw to the police, she is dismissed without ceremony. Determined to see justice done, she takes matters into her own hands, enlisting the reluctant help of Wayne Morgan, a pulp crime novelist whose books she admires and whose apartment she more or less invades.
Nikki's investigation draws her into the Waring household, where she poses as Margo Martin, a nightclub singer, in order to get close to the principal suspects: Arnold Waring, the scheming nephew played with characteristic cold relish by Dan Duryea; the imperious Jonathan Waring; and a retinue of associates with motives to spare. The deeper Nikki reaches into the family's affairs, the more the film complicates her amateur certainty, surrounding her with men who alternately patronize her, pursue her, or fear what she might uncover. Morgan, meanwhile, is pulled between professional skepticism and growing personal investment.
Lady on a Train occupies an unusual position in the 1945 Universal catalogue – a film that grafts screwball comic energy onto a genuine murder plot, then runs both registers simultaneously without fully committing to either. The result is a noir-adjacent entertainment that uses the genre's standard furniture – the duplicitous household, the woman who knows too much, the corrupt or indifferent establishment – while keeping its protagonist buoyant enough to survive them all. The tonal tension is the film's defining quality, and whether that reads as charm or evasion depends entirely on what the viewer asks of it.
