THE LAST TRAIN FROM MADRID (1937)

The Spanish Civil War is heating up and one last train is leaving Madrid with many refugees trying to leave. (The details of the war are, thanks to Hollywood neutrality, completely erased; we are told in an opening crawl that the film is taking no side because "this is a story of people, not ideas." Still, it's not difficult to deduce the good guys from the bad guys.) The film, set in the hours before the train leaves, focuses on several people who have or are trying to get passes for the train. Storyline #1: Gilbert Roland (pictured) is a former Army officer, part of a "Brotherhood" of five soldiers who have crosses carved into their arms. Now a political prisoner, he is being conscripted by the Army into fighting on the Army's side, but an officer who is another Brotherhood member (Anthony Quinn) frees him on the sly. Roland, hoping to be on the last train, goes to visit Dorothy Lamour, his former gal, not aware that she is involved with Quinn. Storyline #2: American reporter Lew Ayres meets Olympe Bradna, a young woman who is desperate to visit her jailed father before he is executed. He gets her there and makes up a story that his sentence has been commuted, even though it has not. After her visit, the father is killed by a firing squad, but (Storyline #3) one solider (Robert Cummings) couldn’t bring himself to shoot and is ordered to the front. In the streets, he meets Helen Mack and tries to help her save a dying old man. When they fail, he asks her if he can have the man's train pass. They discover they grew up in the same town and warm to each other. Storyline #4, or perhaps 1.5: Roland sees Karen Morley, a baroness he used to know, and asks her to get him a pass so he can leave with her. However, her current lover (Lee Bowman) may have something to say about that. All the storylines meet as the train gets underway.

Given the title, I assumed this would be a spy thriller set on a train, but only the last 20 minutes or so are set on the train. This is more like a "Grand Hotel" ensemble movie with individual characters crossing paths with each other on the way to the train getaway. It's a fairly bland affair, so how well you like this movie may depend on how you feel about the actors. I'm a big Gilbert Roland fan so it was worth my time for him alone, but I was surprised by how much I liked Anthony Quinn, looking very young and rather fetching, as a character stuck in a moral gray area. Dorothy Lamour is first billed but she is much less important to the narrative than most of the others. I also liked Morley and Bowman, though they have fairly small roles. Lionel Atwill is the chief Army guy, which should tell you all you need to know about how which political side this movie would be on if it could deal in "ideas" in addition to people. It may be damning it with faint praise to say that this is not as bad as some critics let on—Dennis Schwartz calls it one of the worst movies of the decade, which it surely is not, though I agree with him that it is slow and talky. The performances make it worth seeing. [TCM]