CRUD Challenge: Broadway Limited
Feb. 2nd, 2025 08:06 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
skjamBroadway Limited (1941) dir. Gordon Douglas
Our story opens in Chicago, where Hollywood director Ivan Ivansky (Leonid Kinskey), his top star April Tremaine (Marjorie Woodworth) and personal assistant Patsy Riley (Patsy Kelly) are promoting their most recent movie. It's going swell, but Ivansky is already planning his next movie, which will have a slightly different emphasis. Rather than rely solely on Miss Tremaine's "oomph", this one will be about motherly love. And to promote this idea, he wants to do a publicity stunt where April takes care of a baby on her trip to New York.
Problem! The train leaves in three hours. Where are they going to get a baby by then? Patsy has an idea. As it just so happens, her boyfriend works for the Pennsylvania Railroad as an engineer. And he's going to be the engineer on the Broadway Limited, the train they're planning to take! Maurice "Mike" Monahan (Victor McLaglen) is contacted and he doesn't know how to get hold of a baby either, but a stranger overhears that there's a $500 fee, and says he can get hold of an infant for the trip.
Sure enough, the baby is delivered right on time, and no one asks questions. The Hollywood people are joined on the train by ditzy columnist Myra Pottle (Zazu Pitts), who's writing up the publicity stunt. Things get a bit more complicated when one of the other passengers turns out to be Dr. Harvey North (Dennis O'Keefe), April's childhood sweetheart. It turns out the two still have a flame for each other, much to the jealousy of Ivan.
In Fort Wayne, Mike starts his vacation, switching from engineer to passenger on the Broadway Limited so that he can spend some time with his sweetie Patsy. He's not used to wearing a suit and mixing with passengers, which creates a bit of comedy, and Myra's antics make it hard for him to connect with Patsy. While waiting for her in the observation car, Mike learns from a police detective that a baby was kidnapped in Chicago, and the description sounds an awful lot like the baby he'd helped get on the train. The detective helpfully notes that the last such case he was involved with, the kidnapper was hanged, and the accomplice got 177 years in jail.
So begins a desperate mission to alert Patsy of the hot baby, and thence attempts to hide or get rid of the child so they won't all go to jail.
The Broadway Limited was a real train route from Chicago to Manhattan, and is still in operation today in a revised form. Everything else is fictional.
This screwball comedy uses the train setting pretty well, with tight corridors, odd passengers (a creepy little boy is a recurring red herring), and the inability to get off while it's moving or hide effectively for long. Otherwise it's pretty slight, and the humor is only middling. Myra's fixation on "Renfrew of the Mounted" makes her look more pathetic than funny.
The movie is short, about 75 minutes, which is a good length for this kind of thing, and doesn't drag. It's perfectly acceptable light entertainment, but will be of most interest to railfans who can geek out over the details of rail travel in the 1940s. (There's a particularly good bit where Mike gets a stuck locomotive going.)
Our story opens in Chicago, where Hollywood director Ivan Ivansky (Leonid Kinskey), his top star April Tremaine (Marjorie Woodworth) and personal assistant Patsy Riley (Patsy Kelly) are promoting their most recent movie. It's going swell, but Ivansky is already planning his next movie, which will have a slightly different emphasis. Rather than rely solely on Miss Tremaine's "oomph", this one will be about motherly love. And to promote this idea, he wants to do a publicity stunt where April takes care of a baby on her trip to New York.
Problem! The train leaves in three hours. Where are they going to get a baby by then? Patsy has an idea. As it just so happens, her boyfriend works for the Pennsylvania Railroad as an engineer. And he's going to be the engineer on the Broadway Limited, the train they're planning to take! Maurice "Mike" Monahan (Victor McLaglen) is contacted and he doesn't know how to get hold of a baby either, but a stranger overhears that there's a $500 fee, and says he can get hold of an infant for the trip.
Sure enough, the baby is delivered right on time, and no one asks questions. The Hollywood people are joined on the train by ditzy columnist Myra Pottle (Zazu Pitts), who's writing up the publicity stunt. Things get a bit more complicated when one of the other passengers turns out to be Dr. Harvey North (Dennis O'Keefe), April's childhood sweetheart. It turns out the two still have a flame for each other, much to the jealousy of Ivan.
In Fort Wayne, Mike starts his vacation, switching from engineer to passenger on the Broadway Limited so that he can spend some time with his sweetie Patsy. He's not used to wearing a suit and mixing with passengers, which creates a bit of comedy, and Myra's antics make it hard for him to connect with Patsy. While waiting for her in the observation car, Mike learns from a police detective that a baby was kidnapped in Chicago, and the description sounds an awful lot like the baby he'd helped get on the train. The detective helpfully notes that the last such case he was involved with, the kidnapper was hanged, and the accomplice got 177 years in jail.
So begins a desperate mission to alert Patsy of the hot baby, and thence attempts to hide or get rid of the child so they won't all go to jail.
The Broadway Limited was a real train route from Chicago to Manhattan, and is still in operation today in a revised form. Everything else is fictional.
This screwball comedy uses the train setting pretty well, with tight corridors, odd passengers (a creepy little boy is a recurring red herring), and the inability to get off while it's moving or hide effectively for long. Otherwise it's pretty slight, and the humor is only middling. Myra's fixation on "Renfrew of the Mounted" makes her look more pathetic than funny.
The movie is short, about 75 minutes, which is a good length for this kind of thing, and doesn't drag. It's perfectly acceptable light entertainment, but will be of most interest to railfans who can geek out over the details of rail travel in the 1940s. (There's a particularly good bit where Mike gets a stuck locomotive going.)
