Rome Express (1932 Walter Forde)

Let's get our train thrillers shunted into the right order. Graham Greene's seminal 'entertainment' Stamboul Express (well worth reading) was also published in 1932 (and intriguingly, filmed in 1934 under this title and Seven Lives Were Changed*), two years before Agatha Christie's classic (published 1 January 1934). The Wheel Spins  (Ethel Lina White) came out in 1936, two years before Hitchcock filmed it as The Lady Vanishes (Sidney Gilliat is the writer who links Forde's and Hitch's films). 1932 was also the year of Dietrich train cult hit Shanghai Express.

I didn't know Walter Forde, but the direction's quite interesting: beginning with a (somewhat wobbly) camera prowl around a Paris station while we eavesdrop on various passengers alighting, already such a convention that Hitch deliberately avoids it in his train thriller. (Günther Krampf (Pandora's Box, The Student of Prague, The Hands of Orlac) is on camera.) And there's some quite interesting intercutting between scenes.

Donald Calthrop (Blackmail, Major Barbara) is on the run and gets mixed up with Harold Huth and Joan Barry (both married, but not to each other) while trying to dodge fellow villains Conrad Veidt and Hugh Williams, who's smitten with ex and now film star Esther Ralston, managed by publicist Finlay Currie. Also involved are hard-assed millionaire Cedric Harwicke and humble employee Eliot Makeham, and Poirotish sweet-popping head of the Sûreté Frank Vosper. Gordon Harker is the train bore, who we heartily wished had been thrown off the train or murdered (think of Lionel Jefferies in annoying role).

Esther Ralston.

"I saw her first!" Harker, Calthrop, Huth.

Thoroughly enjoyable.

* No sign of it on DVD, naturally. Even the BFI doesn't have a copy.