Streamline Express

An odd little curiousity of a film. An assortment of unlikely characters take an express train from New York to California, the main plot revolves around a stage director in pursuit of his leading lady (the same plot that was used much more successfully in Twentieth Century the year before) and a crook on the run from the police who engages in a little robbery and blackmail en route (he fails and is exposed by the stage director).

As a film its very stagey, the acting is too - they all make their entrances and exits as if they're treading the boards. Mainly of interest for the train itself, as a 1930s idea of what rail travel should be like. This is a double deck, 160mph monorail, luxuriously fitted out like an art deco ocean liner!

Featuring a shockingly youthful Victor Jory & Sidney Blackmer. Leonard Fields not surprisingly never directed another film after this very poor man's 'Twentieth Century' that feels as if it had been sitting on the shelf for about five years; both for it's technical primitiveness (the model shots of the train are unbelievable, for the wrong reasons) and it's sometimes off-colour humour, the script evidently written preCode.

A forgettable low-budget riff on Twentieth Century. It's made well enough, but is entirely disposable.

A motley assortment of well-to-do people get aboard the Streamline Express, a new luxurious train, New York to California, non-stop in 20 hours. Victor Jory wants to get Evelyn Venable back for his new stage production; she has just walked out on dress rehearsals and is traveling with Ralph Forbes to get married in Santa Barbara. Erin O'Brien-Moore wants to get husband Clay Clement back from Esther Ralston, who is being blackmailed by Sidney Blackmer.

And so forth. The actors put in good performances, particularly the first triangle in a comic plot that suggests the previous year's screwball 20TH CENTURY, but the whole movie has a cobbled-together feeling and the interior of the train is oddly commodious for something that has to fit on a rail line. The overall effect is of an ambitious but cheap-and-hasty production that is too erratic to maintain interest.

Expecting to enjoy a very cool train film, I wound up being greatly disappointed with this movie. For starters, the train in the title turns out to be a most unconvincing model which, after its christening, is little seen the rest of the film, save for brief shots of it speeding along. According to the script, it travels on a special monorail across the country, the construction of which presumably rivaled the laying of the transcontinental railroad tracks back in the day. At any rate, the film is shot in interior sets that could have been in any hotel, and a drab one at that.

On to the plot, of which there is little. In fact, I am convinced it is a leftover hash-up from some other project coupled with a super-train angle to give it some box office appeal. Previous reviewers have detailed the story, what there is of it, but there is not one interesting scene in the picture. The characters are cardboard, the dialog stilted and the pace tedious.

I give this film my lowest rating. Another record-setting-train film, "The Silver Streak" (1934) is "Citizen Kane" by comparison. I advise anyone who loves trains or good films to avoid this disappointing mess.