Camino del destierro

I find movies from the 1930's surprisingly unpredictable. The era produced several wonderful movies that were in many ways well ahead of their time and never seem to go out of date. I think of "Gone With The Wind" or "Mutiny On The Bounty" or even "The Wizard Of Oz" as examples. Then you get "Exile Express." It simply looks and feels old - and I suspect it started to feel that way very quickly.

The "exile express" is a train taking a group of deportees from San Fransisco to Ellis Island, where they'll bid farewell to America. The "exiles" we're introduced to are an apparent gangster, a likely Bolshevik, and Nadine (Anna Sten), an assistant to a scientist who has developed a sort of pesticide that can also be a horribly lethal weapon. Some foreign power wants to get the formula, and the authorities suspect that Nadine is involved in the plot. She isn't, but she's ordered deported anyway, and the movie becomes the story of her journey and attempt to find a way to stay in the U.S.

The problem is that there isn't a particularly well-developed story here. There seem to be huge gaps in the plot, one of the key twists in the movie (revealing one of the foreign agents) is given far too early and the characters aren't that well developed. Even the foreign nation looking to steal the formula isn't named, although my guess, given the story as it is and when the movie was made, is that it's Nazi Germany. (I believe at one point Nadine said she had an "Uncle Berchtold" - which sounds German to me.) Sten's performance is pretty good, and the other saving grace was the comedic performance of Walter Catlett as Gus, a newspaper reporter who's covering the exile express. Nothing much else leaped out at me as worthy of note in this, however. 3/10

On the eve of her becoming an American citizen, Anna Sten is approached by a spy about the weapons-grade pesticide her boss, Harry Davenport, is developing. Later that evening, Davenport is killed and the pesticide is stolen. Suspicion falls on Miss Sten. She is being deported where she escapes with the help of gallant newsman Alan Marshall.

Despite a great cast, including supporting players like Jerome Cowan, Walter Catlett, Jed Prouty, Stanley Fields and Etiene Girardot, and Edwin Justus Mayer co-writing the screenplay, this never rises above the level of a rushed B picture. Few of the players are given a chance to inhabit their characters, so their inclusion in the cast list seems like a waste of time. Neither does the meat of the plot seem to make much sense. Once the formula is in their hands, why hang around to involve Miss Sten further in the effort? Director Otis Garrett had only recently graduated to the director's chair, and would die before he could get out of the Bs. Had this been the typical level of his future efforts, he likely never would have.

Filmed at Universal Studios using whatever studio contract photographers happened to be available on the day, this movie is a mess, thanks largely to the producer's decision to jazz up the script with ill-advised slapstick.

Admittedly the original Mayer scenario was no great shakes. The plot was a Hollywood stand-by that was even being used at that very moment by M-G-M's It's a Wonderful World. In the Metro movie, however, the comedy was most adroitly integrated into the murder-and-suspense plot. Here it is not. Worse still, the slapstick is both way overplayed and incompetently directed. Only George Chandler manages to make something of his scenes. Girardot is a bore (admittedly his material is not only mighty thin but exhaustively spun out), while Catlett and Prouty adopt a similar ruse by shouting and screaming to absolutely no effect whatever—except to bore audiences silly. A pity, because the murder plot seemed promising enough before it suddenly switched to lowbrow slanging matches between Prouty and Catlett, and the equivalent of pie-in-the-face, courtesy of Vince Barnett.

By the time Girardot makes his belated entrance, the audience is well and truly fed up with the movie. At this stage, not even Clark Gable could rescue the script, but Alan Marshal makes little effort other than to keep smiling blithely away, while Miss Sten is content to pose for soft, gossamer close-up after soft, gossamer close-up. Unfortunately, that's not enough. The acting honors, such as they are, are easily stolen by Leonid Kinsky of all people!

When the film begins, Nadine (Anna Sten) is working hard practicing for her citizenship exam. She desperately wants to become a US citizen. However, when her boss, the Professor, is murdered, the police inexplicably blame her and are going to deport her!

Soon she's on a train headed to New York for the deportation and along are a host of other deportees including a one-dimensional communist and a gangster. You know that SOMETHING bad will prevent the train from arriving in New York--either other gangsters or spies will soon be arriving. Soon Nadine and a very stereotypical reporter are off the train--running cross country while being chased by evil folks.

This film is obviously a very low-budget B-movie. Like many Bs, this one was hastily written and has a few broad and annoying characters and isn't especially enjoyable. It also makes very little sense most of the time. It's obvious that realism is NOT a strong point in this movie! Overall, the film offers few flashes of brilliance and is, at best, a time-passer.

Anna Sten is backed by a hard-working cast in this film, one of the last productions from Grand National Pictures, but the players can utilize very little from a raggedly scripted and weakly directed affair during which Sten, in spite of her heavily accented English, is apt to please a viewer more by her performance than will the assemblage of stereotypical character types with whom she is interjoined. Ukrainian Sten is cast here as Nadine Nikolas, a Russian emigrant to the United States who is diligently studying for her citizenship qualification exam and employed as a laboratory assistant for a research chemist, Dr. Hite (Harry Davenport) who has discovered a (not terribly) secret formula, poisonous gas that is coveted by both the U.S. government and spies sent from a foreign nation (clearly meant to be the Soviet Union), but when Hite is slain, the subsequent scandal is more than enough to not only prevent Nadine from achieving her goal to become an American citizen, but additionally to place her aboard the eponymous "Exile Express", a deportation train that is the initial leg of a forcible return to her erstwhile Eastern European homeland. Her future plans blighted by enmeshment in a homicide, Nadine has glumly accepted her portion until she receives unexpected succour from a maverick journalist, Steve Reynolds (Alan Marshall), who has appointed himself as the eyefilling blonde's bodyguard after helping her escape from the train, with the two of them thereupon striving to elude both the set of murderous Slavic spies and a collection of U.S. law enforcement officials. A goodly portion of the film is apparently designed to be a skittish comedy, but the scriptors have sadly neglected to write lines that are even nominally comedic, and prosaic plotting is hardly helped by tepid direction given by Otis Garrett, on loan from Universal Pictures, with an effect that both featured and supporting actors are left to rely upon previously established stylistics that merely contribute to the tired quality of the tale. A repletion of poorly constructed farcical interludes, in combination with flaccid attempts at suspense and romance have brought about a work lacking in style, yet overstocked with predictability. Sten's widely undervalued ability is put to proper use as she is able to furnish some sparkle to her characterization, but the other players in most cases walk through their parts, with the exception of Leonid Kinskey who earns the acting laurels as a sinister foreign agent. The piece is reissued upon an Alpha Video DVD and, in accord with that company's custom, has not been remastered, as is easily evident. Its credits show George Parrish as composer of the work's score, but the latter is in truth a goulash from studio stock.