World War II provided some great material for the makers of B pictures. Just two months after releasing a thriller about a professional forger forced to work for a Nazi spy ring, I Escaped from the Gestapo (1943), Monogram Pictures put out the fast-paced, low-budget Spy Train (also 1943) about innocents trapped aboard a locomotive with Nazi spies and a piece of luggage primed to explode; the appropriate working title was "Time Bomb". Both movies were directed by Harold Young who, after a brief stint in top A productions with the Leslie Howard-Merle Oberon costume adventure The Scarlet Pimpernel (1934), found himself turning out quickie programmers in almost every genre.

Monogram was one of the most successful of what was known as the "Poverty Row" studios. Despite the nickname and the relative obscurity today of most of the movies they turned out, these studios should not be too readily dismissed as failures or unworthy of attention. The B pictures they produced were the industry's bread and butter and were generally fun and exciting genre films that gave the nation's movie theaters ample product in the busy 1930s and 1940s. These studios often provided a training ground for fledgling performers and technicians, a home for more experienced actors and behind-the-camera artists who had either passed their prime or never made it into the higher echelons of stardom, and the basis for an independent film movement. For directors like Young, they offered steady employment through the lean years until the rise of television brought more opportunities.

The ingénue in Spy Train, Catherine Craig, began her career in 1940, the same year she married actor Robert Preston. Never able to attain major stardom, Craig retired from acting after appearing in the Barbara Stanwyck film No Man of Her Own (1950). She and Preston were together until his death in 1987. She died in 2004, just a few days short of her 89th birthday.

Viewers may recognize the actress playing the role of Millie––Thelma White, who achieved dubious mortality as Mae Colman, the seductive blonde who lures young people into drugs and ends up leaping from a window in the cult classic Reefer Madness (1936, original title Tell Your Children). She made her last film in 1948, eventually becoming a successful agent for such actors as Robert Blake, James Coburn, and Ann Jillian.

Producer: Max King
Director: Harold Young
Screenplay: Bart Lytton, Wallace Sullivan, Leslie Schwabacker; Scott Littlefield (story)
Cinematography: Mack Stengler
Art Direction: Dave Milton
Film Editing: Martin G. Cohn
Cast: Richard Travis (Bruce Grant), Catherine Craig (Jane Thornwall), Chick Chandler (Stew Stewart), Thelma White (Millie), Paul McVey (Hugo Molte), Evelyn Brent (Frieda Molte), Fred 'Snowflake' Toones (Pullman car porter), Warren Hymer (Herman Krantz)
BW-62m.

by Rob Nixon