"Spy Train" opens in the train station with two reporters talking about getting the scoop on a famous rich girl. Then we overhear a conversation between a gang of thugs planning trouble at 10:22 that night. Catherine Craig plays Jane Thornwall, the girl that the reporters are chasing, while Richard Travis is Bruce Grant, traveler and author. They all get on the train, and the bodies start piling up. No real big names in this Monogram Pictures shorty (61 minutes) a spy thriller from 1943. Keep an eye out for Thelma White (plays Millie the maid)... who had played Mae in Reefer Madness. At one point, the author has to look up something in one of his own books while trying to solve the crime... a little strange. With a little spiffing up, this could easily be a Hitchcock film. and that darn horn on the train.... it was tooting almost the entire 61 minutes... for those who hadn't ridden a train before, one might think the horn had to be tooting in order for it to move... and at another point, someone magically decodes a secret message, although we don't know just how they did it. If you overlook some of these little quirks, one can easily buy into the plot of spies and international intrigue which was all the rage in the early 1940s. Looks like they don't show this one very often; as of April 2008, not even five votes yet on the star-rating in IMDb.
