Lady on a Train (1945) on Netflix
NR19451h 34mComedyCrimeMysteryRomanceThriller
Traveling to New York for Christmas, Nikki Collins sees a murder from her train window. The police dismiss her story, so she asks mystery novelist Wayne Morgan to help.
- Netflix3.5/5
- IMDb6.7/102,908 votes
- Rotten Tomatoes71%
Trailer
Plot summary
Nikki Collins, a San Francisco debutante, is traveling to New York City to spend Christmas with her aunt, and her father's employee Haskell is supposed to meet her at the station. Before the train reaches Grand Central it stops briefly, and when Nikki looks up from her mystery novel she sees a killing in a building beside the tracks. The desk sergeant notices the book in her hand and decides she imagined it, so she asks Wayne Morgan, who wrote that novel, for help. She follows him into a theater, where a newsreel reports that shipping magnate Josiah Waring died by accident, and she recognizes him as the man she saw. She then makes her way onto the Waring estate on Long Island and is taken for Margo Martin.
Cast
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about Lady on a Train (1945)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- Agatha Christie's 1957 novel 4.50 from Paddington borrows its opening premise from Lady on a Train: a woman witnesses a murder from a train window and is at first not believed because she was reading a murder mystery novel.
- Donald Cook, Robert Paige and Franchot Tone were all discussed as possible leading men before the role went to David Bruce, who had played support in Deanna Durbin's previous two films; producer Felix Jackson said Bruce was cast on the strength of his work in Christmas Holiday.
- The novelization of the film by Leslie Charteris, published by Shaw Press in 1945, was the first fiction novel of his not to feature Simon Templar since the early 1930s, and the last of his career, as he wrote only Templar books afterwards.
- The scenario of a woman witnessing a murder from a train was reused as the basis of the Return of the Saint episode "Signal Stop", starring Leslie Charteris's character Simon Templar; executive producer Robert S Baker said Charteris was surprised by the script's similarity to Lady on a Train.
