Train of Events

Trying to repeat the formula of Dead of Night, Ealing came a horrible cropper with this portmanteau telling, in flashback from a train crash, the stories which brought three groups of people aboard the Euston-Liverpool express. Shorn of the talents of Cavalcanti and Hamer, the direction is flat. The trilogy of shoddy yarns (melodramatic, comic, tragic) sprout clichés by the yard, and arbitrarily resort to the crash as a resolution. Worst of all is the linking device involving scenes from the life of a Cockney engine-driver and his wife, soon - as played by Jack Warner and Gladys Henson - to achieve cosy apotheosis as Mr and Mrs Dixon of Dock Green in The Blue Lamp.