Anna Sten plays a hapless Russian lab assistant studying for her U.S. citizenship papers, when her boss—who has invented a poison gas—is murdered, leading to her forced deportation to Ellis Island on a train dubbed the “Exile Express.” A friendly newspaperman (Alan Marshall) helps her escape and elude both the police and various spies attempting to acquire the scientific formula. Made and released shortly before World War II erupted in Europe, when the refugee crisis and infiltration by foreign spies were politically hot topics in the U.S., one can imagine the producers thinking they could lighten things up by making a comedy-drama about the subject. And so Jerome Cowan, Walter Catlett, Stanley Fields and Leonid Kinskey provide comic relief, with Kinskey shamelessly scene-stealing, owing to the weak direction by B-roller, Otis Garrett, on loan from Universal.
Exile Express (1939) was one of the last of only a handful of films distributed by Grand National Film, a company founded in 1936 as a United Artists style operation. Housed in the old Educational Studios complex in Hollywood, Grand National went under in 1939, the studio going to PRC. The actual producer, Eugene Frenke, was Sten’s husband, who had directed her in a previous comeback attempt in the U.K., Two Who Dared (1936), in which the British cast failed to convince anyone they were passionate Russians. But it was her disastrous introduction to Hollywood by Samuel Goldwyn that turned her into a sad legend. Hailed as the new Garbo in a hugely expensive media campaign, Sten flopped in three Goldwyn pictures, mostly because she was miscast in mediocre movies, not because of her acting. After all, she was a product of the Moscow Art Theatre and had played brilliantly for Fedor Ozep, her first husband, in the Soviet Yellow Ticket (1928) and opposite Fritz Kortner in Ozep’s German production, The Murderer Dimitri Karamazoff (1931). Anna Sten is therefore worth watching in this film, because she was herself was a genuine exile who had acted in five different countries in less than 10 years; for her it was not just a role in a movie. —Jan-Christopher Horak
Director: Otis Garrett. Production: United Players Productions, Inc. Distribution: Grand National Pictures, Inc. Producer: Eugene Frenke. Screenwriters: Ethel La Blanche, Edwin Justus Mayer. Cinematographer: John Mescall. Art Direction: Ralph Berger. Editor: Robert Bischoff. Music: George Parrish. Cast: Anna Sten, Alan Marshal, Jerome Cowan, Walter Catlett, Jed Prouty. 35mm, b/w, 71 min.
Restored from the 35mm nitrate camera negative and the 35mm nitrate fine grain master. Laboratory services by The Stanford Theatre Film Laboratory, Audio Mechanics, DJ Audio, Simon Daniel Sound.
