Spy Train

The B-picture industry had a lot of material to work with during WWII.

Spy Train shows how a lot of story can be done with a small budget. The romance and mystery aboard a train serves as a great backdrop for Nazi spies, a dashing leading man(Richard Travis), his comical sidekick(Chick Chandler)and a good supporting cast. The tension of the ticking bomb in the baggage car and the race to stop the spies makes for an entertaining hour! I like Travis' line when the conductor held him for the stabbing of his pal: "..are you blowing your top?.." The only blooper noticeable is the sound of a diesel locomotive horn on a steam train.

Spy Train is a World War II era where reporter Richard Travis and sidekick photographer Chick Chandler are pursuing heiress Catherine Craig and maid Thelma White on a cross country train where most of the film is set. Craig is the daughter of newspaper publisher Herbert Hayes who was until recently publishing expose articles from Travis about Nazi Germany and has stopped without reason and is holed up on his estate.

At the same time some Nazis are aboard the train played by Paul McVey and Evelyn Brent and they've got a pair of suitcases on their. But when you trust Warren Hymer to do a job you've got to expect the inevitable results. One contains a bomb, an act of terrorism more familiar with today's times and the second a list of underground contacts in the USA.

Now McVey and Brent have to stop the bomb until they can get the baggage with the list. As for Travis, he's seen those two before, but it takes him the whole film to remember where and when.

Everybody just goes through the motions here. What can I say, cheap sets, sloppy editing, and perfunctory performances. A typical Monogram Picture.

Perhaps it can be chalked up to the wartime shortages - all the good actors were fighting WWII, as were all the good directors, screenwriters, set builders, sound recorders, etc. They started with a bad story containing far too many contrivances, requiring the first ten minutes to be non-stop exposition which then had to be repeated a few times throughout the film to make sure we all understood. Then they brought in the uninspiring leading man, and the blocky staging by the director, and put them on a minimal set (a train's dining car and sleeping car). Add a few shuffling black porters and some classic wartime German stereotypes, and not a lot of imagination, and the result is this time-filler.

I didn't think anybody could have taken such an inherently suspenseful and exciting situation as a time bomb on a public conveyance and made a dull, stupid movie out of it until I saw "Spy Train." While not quite Monogram at its absolute cheesiest (I watched this not long after catching a download of the Mystery Science Theatre 3000 version of the awful Bela Lugosi vehicle "The Corpse Vanishes" and that one's even worse than this, though this is bad enough the MST3K crew could have done a great number on it), "Spy Train" has all the hallmarks of a bad "B" movie: a plot that makes utterly no sense (didn't the four writers ever talk to each other?), slovenly direction by Harold Young (who has a place in my particular cinematic circle of hell for making the 1934 Leslie Howard "Scarlet Pimpernel" far less fun than it had a right to be), cheap sets, almost incoherent editing and wildly inappropriate music. (Some films of the period staged scenes of suspense, violence or crime to swing music to create an ironic effect; this one did so only because that was what was in Monogram's rent-a-score that week.) I'm giving this a 2 instead of a 1 (you guys don't have a zero, which is what "Smokin' Aces" really deserved) because Richard Travis and Catherine Craig are at least personable and pleasant as the leads; they clearly deserved (and Travis eventually got) better parts than these. This film is trying SO hard to rip off Hitchcock (mostly "The Lady Vanishes" with the bomb gimmick from "Sabotage") and falling so far short of the Master it's rather pathetic, actually.

This Nazi train 'drama' is nearly unwatchable.

Watch this movie right before you drink the poison or pull the trigger. Otherwise skip it and just slam your finger in the door instead.

This movie is in black and white, the lighting is uneven and the sound is messed up in most places. The acting is stiff and mostly bad and the writing is worse but I still hate it for some reason.

If somebody would have blown up the train at the start it would have improved this dog by only a hair.

Jane Thornburg should have never read Bruce's book - it only made her life more complicated than necessary. Even Bruce hadn't read it or he would have known how the movie ends.

I'll give it a 2 because of the dead guy falling out of the closet twice.