Whistle Stop

Not noticing anything on my DVR that was coming up on TV tomorrow, I decided to turn to my Mill Creek "Crime Wave" box set with 50 public domain movies. Since I've only gotten through half a dozen or so of them, I've got a lot left, and picked Whistle Stop.

Whistle Stop has an interesting cast in that it has Ava Gardner as the female lead, on the way up about a year before The Killers would jump-start her career. (The movie has a 1945 copyright, but IMBd gives a January 1946 release date.) Gardner plays Mary, returning to her sleepy hometown of Ashbury MI after spending some time away. This is the sort of station where you have to flag down the train to get it to stop, although it seems surprisingly big for such a town. Mary returns to the rooming house where she had apparently lived, one run by the Veeches (Florence Bates and Charles Judels). Dad drinks a lot and works at the train station, and has an adult son in Kenny (George Raft, who by the mid-1940s is definitely on the way down in his career), who drinks a lot and plays poker. They've also got an adult daughter who's engaged to be married.

Kenny apparently used to be Mary's boyfriend, and he's none too happy seeing her come home from the big city wearing a fur coat, wondering who would give her such a pricey gift. Mary, for her part, may or may not want Kenny back, even though he doesn't seem to have changed his ways at all. So she starts taking up with Lew Lenta (Tom Conway), who runs the sort of nightclub that you'd think they don't have in a sleepy town like Ashbury that only has a whistle-stop train station. But if the town didn't have such a club, we wouldn't have any romantic involvement for the finale. Working for Lew is a bartender Gitlow (Victor McLaglen), who also happens to be reasonably good friends with Kenny.

There's a long scene at the county fair, which doesn't seem to serve much purpose, although it does have a few things happen. First is that somebody takes Gitlow's handgun off of him, pick-pocket style, and plants it on Kenny. Mary is able to find it and take it off of Kenny, and one presumes she gives it to Lew, as Lew eventually winds up with the gun when the real action begins. The other big thing to happen at the fair is an accident in which a young woman falls off the dance platform, suffering a serious injury that she blames on Kenny, to the point that when Kenny finally visits her in the hospital, she goes stark raving bonkers with rage.

The subplot of Kenny's sister getting married, at least, has a bit more of a payoff. Kenny and Gitlow miss the wedding because Gitlow gets a call on the morning of the wedding that he should bring Kenny over to Lew's club so that the two can kiss and make up, well, without the kissing of course. Now, the logical course of action would be for Kenny and Gitlow to point out that they're about to go to a wedding, and could the reconciliation wait until after the wedding. But no. They're stupid enough to go to the club, where somebody has committed a murder with Gitlow's gun. Since he'll be the prime suspect, they flee, but the police have already been called. They try to escape the police but their gas tank gets shot, and eventually Kenny gets shot in the arm too. Thankfully they're able to hop a train.

But there's still a production code out there, which means that something is going to have to happen to exonerate Kenny and bring out the real killer, something that happens when Gitlow goes back to Ashbury.

I found as I was watching Whistle Stop that I had the same problem a lot of the IMDb reviewers had. The movie only runs 81 minutes, but it takes about an hour for the real action to begin. The first hour is slow and introduces characters who don't much matter and events that don't make much sense (such as the injured woman). Mary also has character motivations that don't make much sense: why did she return to town in the first place, and then why did she take up with Lew. The finale only partially makes up for the slow first hour.

Whistle Stop is one of those movies that's nice to have on a cheap box set, but even this cheap box set has had better movies of the ones I've watched.