Two Los Angeles police detectives are tasked to take a former big-time mobster’s widow by train from Chicago to Los Angeles to sing to a grand jury, the mob hot on their trail to catch the canary.
Detective Sergeants Walter Brown (Charles McGraw) and Gus Forbes (Don Beddoe) first must pick up the widow, Mrs. Frankie Neall (Marie Windsor), at a safe house in Chicago and get her safely on the train, because the mob has an all-points hit out on her.
After a close call at a police safe house, the mob can identify Brown and watch for him at the station. According to the plot line, they cannot identify the widow.
On board the train, Brown realizes that a variety of people is very actively looking for him and his witness. He does not like Neall. Windsor has the classic look for the part: bathed in the milk of studio lighting, she has a sexy, flinty edge and serves up everything that a hard-bitten career ‘good cop’ like Brown would presume a ‘mob wife’ to be.
When Forbes earlier asked him about Neall, Brown, never having met her, called Neall a ‘dish’. ‘What kind of a dish?’ Forbes persisted. ‘A sixty-cent special: cheap, flashy, strictly poison under the gravy.’ It may turn out that he ordered from the wrong menu.
As Forbes, Don Beddoe is the first of a complement of fine character actors that lend a good story body and seasoning, including Paul Maxey as Sam Jennings, a plus size train detective with the tag line ‘Nobody loves a fat man,’ and Peter Virgo is Densel, a bad man in plaid and a snap brim fedora, among others.
Brown also meets and makes an ally of Ann Sinclair (Jacqueline White), a mother travelling with her small boy and the boy’s nanny, though his casual association with Sinclair may mean other things to lurking mobsters.
The film contrasts the day lit, orderly civilian world where people follow laws, work and raise families (and African-American red caps and Pullman porters are smiling and obliging), and the night world of illicit activity—sneaks, corruption, theft, bribery and murder (that black men know to be well shun of). True to the film noir genre, the contrasts blur when the givens turn out to be not as they first appear.
The lighting and back projection are beautifully composed, and there also are several lovely, tidy shots that combine actual interior and exterior spaces, such as inside a train compartment and outside the window when the train is stopped at a station. Light flicking by the windows and reflected along interior surfaces throughout the film, as well as a camera lightly jounced from time to time, remind the viewer that the action is taking place on a moving transcontinental train. A long, dark sedan keeps pace ominously alongside the train at night when the kill is set.
The denouement is set up with a shot of Neall in a lacy black negligee filing her nails with a rhythmic shhh-shhh-shhh sound in a fit of malicious pique after a testy exchange with Brown, which cuts to a shot of churning, harnessed locomotive wheels, as though the inexorable wheels of fate, with their solid, rhythmic chug-chug-chug.
A teletyped wire message to Brown urgently crosses the middle of the screen from left to right, warning him that the suspicious men he reported on the train at an earlier stop are mob-connected and dangerous...
Theatrical trailer: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RKQKm-S3cmY
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