Lady on the Train (movie,1945) and Girl on a Train (book, 2015)

We're back to our usual alternatives:  do we want suspense or surprise?
  Alfred Hitchcock in Hitchcock by Francois Truffaut (Simon and Schuster, 1967)

People freely use Hitchcock's name without any understanding of the difference between suspense and surprise.  Paula Hawkins's book The Girl on the Train (Riverhead Books, 2014) and Charles David's film Lady on the Train (Universal, 1945) both traffic in surprise more than suspense, deliberately misleading and manipulating the reader or the viewer.  Of course there is a long tradition of this in the B movie and detective fiction, a tradition I don't much care for.

Lady on the Train was one of Deanna Durbin's last films before she retired (at the age of 27) and moved to France with David, who directed the film.  The film is intelligently directed and photographed --by Woody Bredell -- much like a film noir, most of it taking place at night in dimly lit hotel rooms and nightclubs.  Durbin was trying for more grown-up roles after years of playing the-girl-next-door and was rather successful at it in this film and the previous year's Christmas Holiday, directed by film noir specialist Robert Siodmak and photographed by Bredell.  Universal claimed that audiences did not buy Durbin in this kind of role, even though the movies had a fair amount of singing.  Perhaps it did not help that both these films were downbeat about Christmas, with murder scenes taking place in front of Christmas trees, though in Lady on the Train Durbin sings a lovely version or "Silent Night" over the phone to her father. Durbin continued to complain, justifiably, about bad material and bad directors but Universal was deaf to her complaints.

Paula Hawkins book falls into that dubious genre of Gone Girl (see my entry from 5/6/14) with an unreliable narrator (because she was usually inebriated) and plenty of information withheld from the reader.  Even though there are three different narrators --Megan, Rachel, Anna -- men are often designated by simple pronouns, the better to keep their identity hidden until the (slightly) surprise ending.

Both Hawkins and David use the train motif well:  both have women spying something happening out a train window that initiates their actions.  Deanna Durbin, however, does not go to the police but rather to the author of the mystery she is reading on the train, to solve the murder.  Rachel, in The Girl on the Train, goes to the police and immediately becomes a suspect.