aa56 I was looking forward to a good old English ghost mystery, but this film is mostly like the title of my review. I was getting really close to switching it off, but the thought kept recurring that the English MUST have a good ghost story waiting to unfold.I was wrong. Most of this movie is vaudevillian prattle. The beginning has no plot development, just pointless comedic yakking. Arthur Askey's character Tommy Gander is even more annoying than Kevin Corcoran's Arliss Coates in "Old Yeller." I was so hoping he would die early.The "rule" is, if this is a ghost story, you had better scare the audience somehow within ten minutes, but this film doesn't become even mildly interesting until the stationmaster tells the ghost story. The highlights of this picture are the beautiful Linden Travers and the wonderful Kathleen Harrison, who would endear herself to American audiences as Mrs. Dilber in the 1951 movie "Scrooge."

ingemar-4 Some comedians work a lot on running gags, which means that you must understand the gag before it gets funny. I believe Arthur Askey is playing such strings here. I never heard about him before (I guess he was mostly forgotten when I was born), and found him less than amusing during much of the movie, but I thought the same of other comedians that I came to love. That said, I can't imagine ever rating his humor as highly as e.g. the Marx brothers. Actually, I thought that some of his gags would have been funnier if he had remained silent - like Harpo, or like old silent movies. As I see it, he is more fooling around than doing well thought out and well timed gags. But he is amusing at times, and he looks funny.But to the story, he is spice, not substance. Well, maybe a little. He makes the abandoned station feel smaller than it is, by annoying the other people. And his obnoxious ways did make the train late which put them in the station in the first place.The story felt rather stupid until the plot was unrolled. Maybe not the most original plot ever, but it was pretty well packaged and made perfect sense.Not a top movie, rather a simple low budget B movie aimed at Askey fans. I ended up finding it worth watching.

mark.waltz OK, so Abbott and Costello aren't in this film, but there's lots of laughs here so American audiences can learn to appreciate, as I did, the comedy of someone we here in the states haven't had the pleasure of getting to know. Arthur Askey is a comic I discovered several years ago on TCM with a double showing of "The Band Waggon" and "Charley's Big-Hearted Aunt". I had heard of him before and seen movie stills of him, but hearing his voice and seeing him in his comic firm had not occurred until then. I was able to see this film, based upon an ancient British play, I too, had heard about, yet had never seen in any form."The Ghost Train" is just what the title implies: a train which, filled with ghosts, wants to add the living to their list of passengers. You see the train, you become one. This is the type of play that almost a hundred years ago toured around England and even the states, playing in community theaters (mostly converted barns) and giving audiences a chill much like Tod Slaughter was doing with his similar melodramas "Sweeney Todd" and "Murder in the Red Barn".Previously filmed in 1931, this remake got the comedy treatment with the Harold Lloyd like Askey, playing a ham actor who is stranded in a country station with a group of strangers. Through the station master, these lost folks learn the story of the mysterious train, which fell nearby through a bridge when the old stationmaster died before being able to close the bridge, sending everybody aboard to their deaths. The plot has been updated to the beginning of World War II to give it a sense of timeliness. It still retains the spooky atmosphere, gives Askey a cute song, a damsel in distress, and provides some comedy with a drunken female passenger who passes out and sleeps through the whole thing. Askey's in-your-face comedy is actually quite subtle; He's just a dude who likes to entertain and make people laugh, and some passengers like him more than others. What makes this more watchable for Americans is that there are few references to things we might not get, and the humor is more slapstick than droll.

zee I feel sorry for the English people trying to suffer through WWII with privation, air raids, and their sons off at the front, and I understand why they might have wanted some git prancing around on stage or screen acting like this Askey fool to distract them from falling bombs and the dire outlook of 1941, but it's not 1941 anymore, the Nazis aren't invading us, and the film looks stupid now. The "ghost train" part of the story does not start until nearly minute 25, so what this is is a short mystery film interspersed with the lowest of low stage humor. A few action scenes are run behind narration, then it's back to the prancing git again. The little bit of dramatic acting here is dated, as well. It's not a comedy, it's not a ghost story, it's just a mess. As sympathetic as I feel for the English of that era, and as thankful as I am that they held off the Nazis for so long by themselves, I'm not so grateful that I can recommend this travesty to appease their nostalgia.This is another case where I look at the average user rating and scratch my head and say "huh?"