Audiences have always favored crime thrillers set aboard speeding railroad trains. The tight confines encourage dramatic confrontations and if the pace slackens, one can always cut to a frantic close-up of spinning wheels. 1933's The Silk Express is so intent on its deadly intrigues that it barely has room for a love story. The swift, amusing tale by writers Houston Branch (Safe in Hell, 1931) and Ben Markson (The Half Naked Truth, 1932) involves a Wall Street wolf's scheme to corner the silk market and send prices skyward. The dashing silk importer Kilgore (Neil Hamilton) determines to quash the crooked monopoly by rushing $3 million dollars' worth of the Far-Eastern fabric to New York in less than three days. Kilgore's special highball express carries no regular passengers, just some aides and two special guards. But space is made for a professor (Dudley Digges) suffering from a tropical disease, who must get to the Rockefeller Institute before an upward-creeping paralysis reaches his heart. Sheila Terry is the sick man's worried daughter. When a corpse turns up, railroad detective McDuff (Guy Kibbee) threatens to stop the train. A snowstorm, a kidnapping and more mayhem follow before we know which among the passengers and railroad employees is a killer working to stifle the free market. The suspects include a mysterious stowaway hobo (Allen Jenkins) and even the train's conductor (Arthur Byron). Reviewers praised Ray Enright's light, snappy direction even if they felt that the handsome Neil Hamilton was miscast. His busy pre-Code era career did a slow fade, only to re-ignite three decades later when he won the role of Commissioner Gordon on TV's Batman.

By Glenn Erickson