(The big spoiler is in the last paragraph.)
My first reaction was that this was a really nice piece of film-making from the era when you could produce a 70-minute film. Imagine anyone trying to do that today! I suppose they put it on double bills with a big lobby intermission in the middle.
Anyway, without much in the way of sets except a railroad car, and no special effects, they packed the 70 minutes with story and suspense and plot twists that caught me completely off guard, for one. Marie Windsor did a great job portraying a cynical brassy mob moll whom Charles McGraw is trying to keep from getting bumped off by a gang of crooks on the train from Chicago to L.A. Some of the frames with her in close-up are just works of art.
There are a few old-time clichés, like the fearless little kid (lemme see your gun, mister!) who turned up in a lot of movies of the day, but there is a lot of good stuff, too, like heavy-duty character actor Paul Maxey, who starts off blocking a corridor in a comic bit but then does some other stuff.
So when the disc finished up on the VCR I was pretty satisfied and ready to give this movie a 7, maybe even an 8. But when I started mentally planning this review, going over the plot in my mind when I had some leisure - and bear in mind that I had a lot more time to think about the plot afterward than I did during the movie - I started brooding about some of the big plot holes and so on. Not everyone will do this, of course.
But to start off, just for example, five or ten minutes into the film, after one murder attempt, the cop reports that the killer saw his face but not Mrs. Neal, so they don't know what she looks like. And he turns out to be right. But how can that actually be true? She's the widow of a big mobster, but none of the other mob-connected people have seen her? They have limitless resources for bribery and interstate criminal teams that outnumber and outgun the police, but they can't manage to get a photograph of Mrs. Neal or even find out from any source even the most vague description of her?
That was the beginning, and after that all I could do was ask myself why didn't this person do that, and why did those people do this, and why did the police act this way, etc., and eventually the whole story unraveled in my hand like a badly knitted sweater. But I didn't realize this at the time, because I had been just carried along by the action and the performances! So maybe I should stop complaining!
But there is one other story point which left a bad taste in my mouth, which has to do with the big plot twist and the denouement. (Here's where the big spoiler is.)
Brown is a good cop, who demands a lot of himself and blames himself when his partner gets killed five minutes in, even when it wasn't really his fault that I could see. But later on, after the woman he has been guarding gets killed, he doesn't seem to have a second to spend on remorse or regrets. He and the film dismiss it instantly. It's true that by the time he finds out she is dead he has already found out that she wasn't the real Mrs. Neal, but a Chicago policewoman. But so?? Is he (are we?) supposed to care only for mob widows, not for women on the force? And it's true that she dies because of her unaccountable stupidity - "Lady, you aren't REALLY an impulsive mob moll, and nobody is around, so why do you have to play the part and listen to that stupid phonograph? Are you that addicted to jazz music?" But Brown doesn't know that. If Brown were portrayed as a rotten misogynistic guy at least it would be in character for him to dismiss the faux Mrs. Neal from his mind completely while he squires the real one off the train at the end, but he hasn't been. So it's worse than bad behavior, it's out of character. And it's just to manipulate the audience, to make us think that "Oh, no! They killed Mrs. Neal!" and then tell us a few seconds later that Mrs. Neal is really still alive - "Whew!", so the train is still on the track. And maybe they could have thought it out better with more time or money for script production, but then it would be a better movie, but they didn't and it's not. Although it looks a lot like a better movie if you don't look too close.
My first reaction was that this was a really nice piece of film-making from the era when you could produce a 70-minute film. Imagine anyone trying to do that today! I suppose they put it on double bills with a big lobby intermission in the middle.
Anyway, without much in the way of sets except a railroad car, and no special effects, they packed the 70 minutes with story and suspense and plot twists that caught me completely off guard, for one. Marie Windsor did a great job portraying a cynical brassy mob moll whom Charles McGraw is trying to keep from getting bumped off by a gang of crooks on the train from Chicago to L.A. Some of the frames with her in close-up are just works of art.
There are a few old-time clichés, like the fearless little kid (lemme see your gun, mister!) who turned up in a lot of movies of the day, but there is a lot of good stuff, too, like heavy-duty character actor Paul Maxey, who starts off blocking a corridor in a comic bit but then does some other stuff.
So when the disc finished up on the VCR I was pretty satisfied and ready to give this movie a 7, maybe even an 8. But when I started mentally planning this review, going over the plot in my mind when I had some leisure - and bear in mind that I had a lot more time to think about the plot afterward than I did during the movie - I started brooding about some of the big plot holes and so on. Not everyone will do this, of course.
But to start off, just for example, five or ten minutes into the film, after one murder attempt, the cop reports that the killer saw his face but not Mrs. Neal, so they don't know what she looks like. And he turns out to be right. But how can that actually be true? She's the widow of a big mobster, but none of the other mob-connected people have seen her? They have limitless resources for bribery and interstate criminal teams that outnumber and outgun the police, but they can't manage to get a photograph of Mrs. Neal or even find out from any source even the most vague description of her?
That was the beginning, and after that all I could do was ask myself why didn't this person do that, and why did those people do this, and why did the police act this way, etc., and eventually the whole story unraveled in my hand like a badly knitted sweater. But I didn't realize this at the time, because I had been just carried along by the action and the performances! So maybe I should stop complaining!
But there is one other story point which left a bad taste in my mouth, which has to do with the big plot twist and the denouement. (Here's where the big spoiler is.)
Brown is a good cop, who demands a lot of himself and blames himself when his partner gets killed five minutes in, even when it wasn't really his fault that I could see. But later on, after the woman he has been guarding gets killed, he doesn't seem to have a second to spend on remorse or regrets. He and the film dismiss it instantly. It's true that by the time he finds out she is dead he has already found out that she wasn't the real Mrs. Neal, but a Chicago policewoman. But so?? Is he (are we?) supposed to care only for mob widows, not for women on the force? And it's true that she dies because of her unaccountable stupidity - "Lady, you aren't REALLY an impulsive mob moll, and nobody is around, so why do you have to play the part and listen to that stupid phonograph? Are you that addicted to jazz music?" But Brown doesn't know that. If Brown were portrayed as a rotten misogynistic guy at least it would be in character for him to dismiss the faux Mrs. Neal from his mind completely while he squires the real one off the train at the end, but he hasn't been. So it's worse than bad behavior, it's out of character. And it's just to manipulate the audience, to make us think that "Oh, no! They killed Mrs. Neal!" and then tell us a few seconds later that Mrs. Neal is really still alive - "Whew!", so the train is still on the track. And maybe they could have thought it out better with more time or money for script production, but then it would be a better movie, but they didn't and it's not. Although it looks a lot like a better movie if you don't look too close.