Streamline Express

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

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!

Little seen but fast moving comedy with Evelyn Venable (the original Columbia ‘lady with the torch') and Victor Jory. The express of the title is a train, somewhat similar to the ‘Twentieth Century' a year earlier.

The plot is somewhat forgettable but seems to hinge on Venable being tamed by her man after leading him a merry dance. Ralph Forbes is in there again but doesn't have much more to do than he did in 'Twentieth Century'. Venable and Jory are good value though and keep the interest of the viewer. The other back stories of the train passengers are amusing but they really are very stagey caricatures.

Coming in at little over an hour, this movie certainly lives up to the implied speed of its title. Sadly it isn't likely to inspire many return journeys and seems to have fallen out of even the list of vaguely remembered 30s movies.

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.

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.