Le mystère du rapide

Wonderful train sequence at end

"This train has got the disappearing railroad blues"

Charles Ruggles, Mary Carlisle, and Una Merkel star in this crime thriller on a train, made just as the Hays Production was starting to be enforced. Merkel and Carlisle are telephone operators, Ruth and Georgia, but when circumstances change, they end up on a train, in a private car, with the absent minded, stuttering Ruggles as Godfrey Scott. He "deflects" crimes before they occur....(?) And of course, a 35 year old Sterling Holloway (voice of Winnie the Pooh) as an office boy. Keep a quick eye out for Walter Brennan, the railroad switch- man, in a real brief appearance. They pack a lot of action into the 63 minute shortie from MGM. Good photography with the train "chase scenes", in spite of all the back mattes and sped up film scenes used. There is a confusing scene near the beginning, before they all get on the train, but it becomes quite an entertaining film. Appears to have been remade in 1942 as Grand Central Murder (?) also by MGM.

Silly mystery that almost compensates with a white-knuckle finale. Ruggles plays an addled "deflector" who can't seem to get his sayings right—"The early worm gets the bird"! All in all, he's an imaginative twist on the usual sleuth in that he bumbles his way before getting moments of brilliance. Sort of like a mix of Sherlock Holmes and Inspector Clouseau. Too bad his shtick is not funnier. At the same time, the incoherent mystery part is submerged beneath Ruggles and two loud blondes Merkel and Carlisle who keep the decibel level peaking. They're cute, of course, and understandably get most of the screen time. Overall, I'm not sure what MGM was reaching for, but the parts don't blend that well. Still, the bang-up finale is worth the price, with scares galore and no models for the runaway trains. I'm not sure how they did it with real locomotives and passenger cars, but it comes as a stunning surprise after 50-or-so minutes of blah. Anyway, much of the cast—Ruggles, Merkel--thankfully went on to better material. Meanwhile, no more trains for me, I'll be taking air travel from now on, for sure.

This is the sort of B thriller that made movie-going fun back in the thirties. Mary Carlisle is a hard-working telephone operator at a stock brokerage who suddenly discovers that she's the long-lost daughter of a railroad tycoon. With best pal Una Merkel in tow, she's tricked into boarding a private railway car en route to a reunion with her father. But neither the car nor her fellow passengers are what they appear to be.

Some of it is sorta' silly. There's a circus train wreck thrown in for padding. And Charlie Ruggles' as a "deflective" detective has a few too many goofy bromides. But the climactic chase sequence, as a runaway car roars down miles of twisting mountain track, is superbly directed, shot and edited. And that was back in the days before CGI when you had to film the real thing.

While "Murder in the Private Car" isn't in the same league as "The Narrow Margin" (the gold standard among railroad mysteries,) it's well worth a look. Especially for train buffs. And in just a bit over an hour, it moves along like...well...like a speeding train.

Seldom will the words "what were they thinking?!" come to mind while enjoying a film as often as while watching this pseudo-mystery from the early days of sound at MGM - though not as early as the haphazard writing would suggest.

Enjoy it you will, however, as the odds and ends the entertainment are assembled from are largely quality remainders, borrowed from all kinds of other films than the mystery the title leads one to expect.

Who knows what the original mystery play ("The Rear Car") the film is based on was really like? It lacked sufficient merit to make it to Broadway (neither did "Everybody Comes To Rick's," but that didn't seem to hurt CASABLANCA much), but the stagy "thriller" aspects of the center part of the film suggest that the tossed in ingredients didn't hurt it any.

Chief among the "tossed in" ingredients is Charlie Ruggles' Godfrey Scott, a supposed "detective" occupied far more with the kind of bumbling burlesque comedy Ruggles had been perfecting since his movie debut back in 1914 (and would continue to mine right up until his death in 1970). By the 1930's Ruggles was a well recognized Hollywood commodity in such hits as Brandon Thomas' CHARLEY'S AUNT, THE SMILING LIEUTENANT, LOVE ME TONIGHT and ALICE IN WONDERLAND. MURDER IN THE PRIVATE CAR must have seemed a decidedly second tier assignment to the comedian, but he gave it his all . . . though the biggest laugh in the script may come in the credits - "Edgar Allan Woolf," one of the co-writers was clearly named after Edgar Allan POE, the founder of the modern mystery format with his "C. Auguste Dupin stories in the 1840's! So much for legitimate mystery credentials in this film.

The silly plot (a lost heiress found and at risk) had already been the subject of too many musicals and farces to be taken entirely seriously, and the film makers don't spend to much time seriously laying out the clues and red herrings even though the golden age of the murder mystery was near its peak. Instead, they pull out the stops with cinema-friendly special effects like runaway trains and (never explained) secret panels.

It starts and remains a supremely silly hodge podge, but fun nonetheless for all but the serious mystery fan the title seems to want to attract. Watch for Ruggles and Una Merkle, and don't worry so much about the title murder(s) and a good time is to be had.