New York Express

From the moment starving chorus girl Anna Lee spends her last 20 cents in a grimy New York coffee joint to the crazy Mission Impossible style finale, this is wall to wall entertainment. A really fabulous fun adventure.

What makes this special is that ALL the characters are properly written characters, they've all got personalities and all those personalities are interesting and quirky. Not only is the writing outstanding (with a genuinely amusing script) but so is the acting. OK, most of them are pretty over the top but also believable as real people. The villains are especially villainous especially Mr Jaggers who is gloriously sinister.

When some 1930s pictures, especially American ones, profess to be funny they try much too hard so end up being annoyingly stupid. Character driven humour is only funny if you can believe the characters are people and that's what this achieves. The humour in this is refreshingly subtle, it's dark and witty. As the story evolves, its credibility is stretched to breaking point but as far-fetched as it becomes, Robert Stevenson directs the increasing absurdity as seriously as any drama which adds another dimension to its depth.

I've previously not been too impressed by Anna Lee but in this she's the perfect, wide-eyed thirties movie damsel-in-distress. She's very believable as one of those hundreds of adventurous English girls who ran off to tread the boards in the twenties and thirties. You can really engage with her. Even the precocious child is not annoying!

(No idea why some people have called this is a sci-fi movie?????)

I first heard of Non-stop New York while browsing, of all things, the Aurum Encyclopaedia of Science Fiction films. The only reason that this film was included in that book was because it is 'futuristic' by 3 years; it was made in 1937 while the main action takes place in 1940. One interesting point is that the filmmakers did not know that WW2 had started by then and so there is no mention of it.

For some reason, the film is very obscure, only 39 viewers (including me) having voted for it on IMDb at the time of this writing. But is a fast moving little thriller full of incisive British wit. The film is so quintessentially British that one cannot help but notice that even the 'Americans' are local actors wincing with their attempts at transatlantic accents. But for this one minor flaw, the film is thoroughly enjoyable with perfect casting and good, if lightweight performances. An added bonus, certainly from my own perspective, is that most of the action takes place on board a Transatlantic Clipper, one of those seaplanes that were so glamorous in the 1930s. A definite Collector's item and I am the proud owner of a good quality VHS tape.

Robert Stevenson (1905-1986) was a superb British director, but his name is not widely enough recognised. He is probably most famous for JANE EYRE (1944) with Orson Welles and TOM BROWN'S SCHOOLDAYS (1940). Less well known are his excellent DISHONORED LADY (1947, see my review), and his truly magnificent OWD BOB (1938, see my review), which he made the year after this. In this year, he also made KING SOLOMON'S MINES with Anna Lee, who stars once again in this film of his. This really is a most fascinating film, because of the spectacular second half which takes place on a trans-Atlantic Clipper seaplane, the interior of which resembles that of a zeppelin, on multiple levels with individual sleeping compartments, bar and restaurant. It even has a little balcony where people stand outside to take the air and look down upon the ships which are not far below them. Francis L. Sullivan here gives one of his finest performances as the oiliest and least scrupulous of villains, truly hair-raising in his wickedness. Anna Lee is a typical 1930s English 'sweetie', but with more fibre and character than is usual for that time, and she handles the part of the courageous accidental heroine very well. She is determined to save the wrong man from being executed in America for a crime he did not commit. Anna stows away on the Clipper to get back to America to give her evidence, which Scotland Yard had refused to take seriously. This is very much a Hitchcock-style suspense thriller, and makes excellent viewing. It deserves to be more widely known, as it is certainly a British pre-War classic. If Britain had as many film buffs as there are in America, where almost any trivial B or C movie can achieve fame nowadays, films like this would be familiar and praised, rather than obscure and forgotten. But the British are lazy about their cinematic heritage, and films like this are never shown on British television, so no one even knows they exist. In this film, the child actor Desmond Tester is most amusing as an eccentric child musical prodigy who becomes entangled in the murderous intrigues going on aboard the Clipper plane. If only British films still produced wonderfully strange character actors like that! It was also amusing to see a young Peter Bull scowling with his heavy jowls as a blackmailer in this film. In real life, he was actually rather jolly, although extraordinarily bombastic and often too loud, and he was always available for a chat when he ran his astrological shop in Notting Hill Gate in the 1960s and 1970s.

I bought the video of Non-Stop New York on a whim when I saw it was about a double-decker airplane with an outside deck(!). However, the plane only comes into play during the last half of the film, and when it does, the design of it is so downplayed that we assume double-decker planes were mainstream travel in 1938. The plot involves a chorus girl trying to free an innocent man from death row while being pursued by the gangsters that did it. Yeah, we've all seen it before, but the plane, and the way the movie uses it, truly make this trip worth it.

In my opinion, if you stumbled across a film as esoteric as this in the IMDb and actually are taking the time to read about it, you'll enjoy it. This is what all those Airport movies wish they were.

This unknown classic is a must see. It is fast paced in the Hitchcock style and well acted with a lot of droll sequences intertwined between. Anna Lee couldn't be prettier or more charming. The entire cast including the villain Francis Sullivan are great. The British attempt at American slang is slightly noticeable but otherwise the direction is top notch. I just love that luxury aeroplane and wish that it was a reality to the present air traveller to rid him of the monotony of long travel. The storyline may be a little slow paced but is offset by the acting. Certainly a movie far before its period and not necessarily a curio but most interesting to watch.