Train of Events

'Train of Events', a film with very little humour, was an attempt to get several members of the Ealing Directing team in a 'portmanteau film' - a sub-genre popular at the time and which had worked so well with 'Dead of Night'. The concept was to create three quite separate stories which would, at some point, intersect.

An actor murders his unfaithful wife and then suffers from Edgar Allan Poe style guilt trips. An orphan girl has fallen in love with a fugitive German prisoner-of-war, and a famous conductor has fallen out with his wife following a series of affairs with members of his orchestra. A veritable trio of trauma!



And as if all that excitement wasn't enough a fourth plot interweaves between them all with an engine driver (Jack Warner - evenin' all), his daughter, a visiting American and a jealous fiancé all adding to the entertainment. Not to mention a dreadful train wreck that pulls all the stories to a simultaneous climax.

The first two 'tales' are pure melodrama, laid on thickly by seasoned Ealing stalwart, director Basil Dearden, whilst the third is supposed to offer some comic relief, and is directed by Charles Crichton, another Ealing regular who then went on to direct many ITC shows. The engine driver sequences, featuring Jack Hawkins were all covered by Sidney Cole who had recently won plaudits for his 'The Man in a White Suit'. So,in theory, a dream team.



The resulting film actually feels like several episodes of a TV show forced into the same movie by some clumsy story-telling, though individually they all stand up well enough.

It's set in contemporary (early 40's) England, and part of the pleasure in watching it now is the window it opens to those times including some nice shots of London.

The film starts in the moments before a rail crash, and then flashes back from that after the films titles run. We are told (by caption) that the time is now 'Three days earlier'. As a result - we know the train will crash. But we don't know when, how - or why.



A young Peter Finch plays an actor who has a very dark secret on the train. (Look in the body-sized wicker trunk he has with him!). He has been visited by his estranged wife and we learn that she has been unfaithful during his time away on the army. (This is not the only reference to the negative effects of the war in this film). There's a great scene where she plays 'their song' ('These Foolish Things') over and over on the gramophone though it gets stuck, endlessly repeating as he strangles her. He is due to travel to Canada with an acting troupe that he is a part of and he takes the body with him on the train. Which train? You guessed it. The ill-fated 3.45PM from Euston to Liverpool.

Also aboard are two young lovers, Richard and Ella (Laurence Payne and Joan Dowling). He is an ex-POW who doesn't want to return to Germany and as a result the pair have been hiding in seedy lodgings staying just one small step ahead of the law. Having stolen some money from her landlady, who was in the process of throwing them out, they are even more terrified of capture on the train they have boarded. Which train? You guessed it. The ill-fated 3.45PM from Euston to Liverpool.



Finally, an incorrigible composer (played by John Clements), has taken up with yet another member of his orchestra, a star pianist, the temperamental Irina who is entranced by the composer's attention. When Irina visits his wife (Valerie Hobson) to tell her that she must let him go she very casually agrees. This, of course, is not at all the reaction that the arrogant composer imagined, so it's not long before he is hankering for his wife again. Where better to let the love struck pianist know than on the train. Which train? You guessed it. The ill-fated 3.45PM from Euston to Liverpool.

In a final series of sub-plots, Jim the engine driver is having troubles of his own. His daughter's fiancé is upset when she agrees to meet up with an American man she befriended during the war and in protest tries to quit his job. Jim puts pay to this when he and a colleague knock him out and put him into an empty carriage to cool off. However, the carriage is attached to a locomotive and pulls out before they can stop it, leaving Jim to sign on and off the young worker's shift to save him losing face. Up for a Manager's position after so many years service, Jim jeopardises his chanced through this dishonesty.



So back to the ill-fated 3.45 to Liverpool. Ella and her P.O.W lover are nervously aboard, Irina and the composer are tucked away in first class, and the killer - actor sweats it out with his comrades worrying that detectives are already on to him.

Then we see a tanker stuck across the tracks and we watch the whole collision (much of which clearly used toy trains). A few minutes later and the train is nothing more than a tangled wreck. Ella lies on a stretcher and her German lover watches as she takes her last breath. He wanders away before a piece of paper drops from her pocket revealing a single ticket to Canada - her gift of freedom for him. Richard, the actor, is crushed underneath a falling carriage just as detectives spot him - and the hamper. Irina and the composer seem only slightly bruised though in the final shot of them we see them playing with an orchestra who, in large part, are covered in bandages. And to end on a happy note, we see Jim leaving for work in a bowler hat. He has clearly made Management after all.



All in all, a passable and enjoyable Ealing outing if not a classic. The transfer is 4:3 which is not far from the original Academy standard and is actually a very clean transfer. On a final note, here's a bit of trivia in the 'not a lot of people know that' category.

Jack Warner was perm permanently injured while making this film. He had insisted on learning how a steam engine is driven to get his posture right, and he hurt his back badly during this training. He had a slight limp ever afterwards which became noticeably worse as he got older, giving 'Dixon of Dock Green' that amiable hop-along gait.