Los Angeles Union Station has been called the “last of the
great railway stations built in the United States.” With its signature clock
tower, tiled arches, and cavernous lobby, the station is one of downtown’s most
recognizable structures. It opened during the summer of 1939, crowding out a
large portion of the city’s Chinatown neighborhood. It has also been a popular
and versatile movie location, appearing in classic noirs such as Criss Cross, Cry Danger, and The
Narrow Margin, as well as in newer films ranging from Bugsy to Blade Runner. However its biggest moment came in 1950, as the
featured location in Paramount’s film noir, Union Station.
Despite the rail connections, Union
Station is essentially a kidnapping picture, peppered with police
procedural elements and suspenseful cat-and-mouse chases. Unfortunately most of
the chatter about the film is mired in the banal issue of where it actually
takes place. With references to New York, Los Angeles, and Chicago, the setting
is a geographic impossibility meant, as was en vogue at the time, to be
emblematic of all American cities. It has all of the bells and whistles that
draw us to noir, including a hardboiled story from noir scribe Sydney
Boehm (Side Street and The Big Heat), and a superb visual
identity — courtesy of Rudolph Maté, who transitioned to directing after
earning five Oscar nominations as a cinematographer. Noir fans are most likely
to remember Maté as the director of an earlier 1950 project, D.O.A. — though as unconventional
as the concept of that movie assuredly is, Union Station is in every other way a superior film.
It has a fine cast, with Sunset Blvd.
star William Holden as railroad cop Willie Calhoun, and Oscar
winner Barry Fitzgerald as city police detective Donnelly. The two
actors have great chemistry, and while it has become a cliché for screen cops
to bicker over jurisdiction, their characters work together comfortably.
Regardless of who is actually in charge, the older Donnelly appears content to
mentor his inexperienced protégé rather than taking the lead. Their quarry is
Joe Beacom (Lyle Bettger), a cold-blooded, misogynistic killer who dreamt up a
big time score while doing a stretch for a stick-up. Beacom and a pair of
cronies, Gus and Vince, kidnap Lorna (Allene Roberts), a blind girl who dotes
on her tycoon father, Mr. Murchison (Herbert Heyes). They stash her with
Beacom’s girlfriend (the exceptionally good Jan Sterling, whose part is
entirely too brief) and chase down the commuter train headed for Union Station, where they stow the
girl’s bag and scarf in a locker, then mail the key to her unsuspecting father.
However, Mr. Murchison’s personal secretary Joyce (Nancy Olson), also a
passenger on the train, notices their suspicious behavior and reports her
concerns to the police.
The rail terminal is an ideal setting for the drama of Union Station to play out.
Preceding widespread commercial airline or interstate highway travel, it hosted
the “immense human traffic” of life in the boom years following the Second
World War. Not itself a destination, the terminal is a locus where everyone
hurries, paying as little attention as possible to other travelers. The station
is also a place of many observation points, where police, civilians, and
criminals conduct surveillance. On the whole, Union Station is very concerned with the nuances of how and
what we pay attention to, and with the art of being seen but not noticed. For
those wishing to hide their schemes beneath large-scale comings and goings, the
station is an irresistible venue. And unlike the preening movie gangsters from
a generation before, with their payoffs and ‘legitimate’ businesses, the
heavies of film noir shy away from attention, forcing the police to adopt new
tactics in their fight against crime. Yet like the maze of tunnels that
dominate Union Station’s climax,
something treacherous lurks under the surface of the film: it subtly undermines
the methodology of by-the-book law enforcement, instead arguing for the kind of
gung-ho maverick police officers who would eventually dominate the American
crime film.
The police in movies made prior to Union
Station are typically portrayed as caring family men who live only “To
Protect and Serve,” but the cops here begin to depart from this wholesome
image. Calhoun and his mentor Donnelly want justice for Lorna, but they
cynically believe she’s already dead — and smoothly lie to her father so that
he’ll follow through with the money drop, which they believe will lead them to
the kidnappers. This callous game of charades is all the more chilling as
played by the lovable Fitzgerald, whose character repeatedly promises Mr.
Murchison that the police won’t “do anything” until the money has changed hands
and Lorna is safe.
In Union Station’s one truly
brilliant scene, the police nab Vince, one of Beacom’s accomplices. He refuses
to talk, so a gaggle of cops strong arm him onto the platform and convince him
that he’ll be murdered if he doesn’t snitch. Once again the casting of Barry
Fitzgerald pays off, as he and Holden employ a smooth good cop-bad cop routine
that ends when frustrated good-cop Donnelly mutters to Calhoun, “Make it look
accidental.” Soon Vince’s head is shoved in the path of an oncoming express and
he’s begging to spill his guts. By paying close attention to Holden’s “performance”
during the questioning it becomes clear that the whole thing is a sham; however
it’s fair (and fascinating) to speculate about whether the filmmakers wanted
viewers to take the scene at face value, or as a wink-wink acquiescence to the
Breen Office, which likely would have intervened at any credible evidence that
the cops would stoop to murder. Regardless, the scene showed audiences
something unusual for the time: cops brutally violating a suspect’s civil
rights. The scene evokes a strikingly similar moment in a post-code
contemporary film, L.A. Confidential,
where it’s abundantly clear that while Ed Exley’s slickly polished interrogation
of the Night Owl suspects involves much playacting, Bud White’s actions are
something else entirely.
The irony of Vince’s interrogation is that his capture came not as a result of
police work, but because Joyce, conducting her own surveillance, simply points
him out him to Calhoun. In fact, it is always Joyce, rather than Calhoun or his
men, who identifies bad guys or notices the life-saving detail. Furthermore,
both she and Mr. Muchison make it clear that police involvement in the affair
is not entirely welcome. Joyce expresses regret about reporting her initial
suspicion of Beacom, while Mr. Murchison tells Donnelly that he thinks that
Lorna is most likely to survive if the law stays far away and simply lets him
pay the ransom. Their lack of faith in the cops is understandable but unusual
for a film of this vintage. Although an early scene establishes that Calhoun
can spot a small-time hustler from a mile away, when it comes to heavies like
Beacom the cops are surprisingly ineffective. The kidnappers stroll through the
station without being noticed, even when one them, Gus, is obviously casing Mr.
Murchison. Joyce identifies him, but in the sequence that follows Calhoun can’t
even accomplish a routine surveillance operation. After Gus boards the elevated
train, the police attempt a simple revolving tail, but after they overplay
their nonchalance he gets wise and runs. A footrace quickly gives way to a
gunfight, and Gus meets a grisly fate at the city stockyards. The scene is
exhilarating, but it underlines the recurring notion that the police are out of
their depth. Scratch one kidnapper, but Lorna’s chances of survival are bleaker
than ever. In their defense, the cops understand Beacom better than Mr.
Murchison: Lorna may still be alive, but Beacom has no intention of returning
her to her father. He plans to dump her body in the river as soon as he secures
the ransom.
In light of the law’s many failures, audiences were obliged to decide whether
or not these were just dumb cops — which they do not seem to be — or if the
increased savvy of the hoods and numbers of bodies passing through Union
Station was simply too much to handle. So in this increasingly complicated
world, with its new-type hoods, how can the law expect to stay ahead? The
answer may lie (and pave the way for the movie cops of the next fifty years) in
a fascinating exchange between Calhoun and Donnelly that occurs just after they
receive news that Beacom has gunned down a lone officer pounding a beat:
“That patrolman have a family?"
“Four”
“Too bad he tackled a setup like that alone. A guy doesn’t
jump into the fire feet first.”
“Well, some days a man has to jump. Feet first or head
first.”
“A foolish man.”
“You were in the war, Calhoun. Were you ever pinned down by
mortar fire? In my time it was cannon balls, the kind they have on monuments
now. But even then there was some man, some foolish man who stood up and walked
into it. That’s how wars are won.”
“That’s how fellas wind up on slabs before their time.”
In Union Station’s
exciting underground finale, Beacom surfaces to grab the ransom, but his plans
unravel when Joyce (of course) notices his decisive blunder. In the moments
that follow, Calhoun shrugs off his cop pretensions for the simple truth of the
gun, and becomes that “foolish man” who jumps into the fire. He pursues Beacom
through the machine-filled basements of the train station, and down into the
tunnels that spread underneath like worm holes. High on the rough tunnel walls
are wooden signs that read “Caution: Stop-Look-Listen,” and beneath them cop
and crook punctuate the damp blackness with gunfire, until only the lucky one
is left breathing. Further up the tunnel, a sightless girl sobs over the terrifying
uncertainty of the next few moments...
Union Station (1950)
Studio: Paramount Pictures
Directed by Rudolph Maté
Produced by Jules Schermer
Written by Sydney Boehm
Based on a story by Thomas Walsh
Cinematography by Daniel L. Fapp
Art Directed by Hans Dreier and Earl Hedrick
Starring William Holden, Barry Fitzgerald, Nancy Olsen, Lyle Bettger, Jan Sterling, and Allene Roberts
Running time: 81 minutes
Jumpy. Mr. Upstairs. The dame?
Call her Solitaire. With character names as delicious as these, the plot practically becomes secondary. Here it is anyway. The Feds send Mark Reed (Kent Taylor) down Mexico
way to get to the bottom of an elaborate gold smuggling ring. Seems like a gang
of hoods, run by Mr. Upstairs, have blackmailed a university archaeology
professor (Robert Rockwell) into sneaking the gold through customs hidden
inside artifacts from his dig. Reed infiltrates the gang and things unfold
about as you’d expect them to—until a whopper of a surprise at the end almost pushes the movie into film noir territory. (Not quite though.) There’s almost no chance
you’ll track this down and see it, so I don’t mind spoiling: There’s no sunset
to ride off into for agent Reed. Just when you think he’s about the turn the
tables on Mr. Upstairs, the old man uncorks a revolver and ventilates him.
Borrowed from T-Men? Maybe, but
eyebrow-raising nonetheless. 
Star Kent Taylor acted in
Hollywood for five decades, but he’s a forgettable hero. Likeable but bland, he
reprised Chester Morris’s Boston Blackie
character on television for three years in the early 1950s. Dorothy Patrick
actually gets top billing as Solitaire, the is-she-or-ain’t-she-a-bad-girl
nightclub owner. Patrick accounts for most of the film’s verve. She was coming
off a strong showing in the 1949 Oscar heavyweight Come to the Stable, but her career never took off as it should
have. Film noir fans will undoubtedly recognize her as the girl Friday in
1949’s Follow Me Quietly. Bag of
potatoes Robert Rockwell is billed third. He and Eve Arden spun Our Miss Brooks’s into some small
measure of immortality, but then the cast falls into obscurity. All the fourth billed star, Estelita Rodriguez, has
to offer is a pair of songs. 
