UNION DEPOT (1932)

Low rent GRAND HOTEL/'32 with multiple/loosely interconnected storylines of everyday Jack & Jills not at some ritzy Berlin Hotel (The Adlon?), but at a train station patterned on NYC’s Grand Central.*  Crazy entertaining over a jam-packed 67 minutes, it reps best effort work from normally poky director Alfred E. Green, alive to every ethnic minority quirk in roving dialog grabs with lenser Sol Polito freely wandering art director Jack Okey’s vast station set.  Plus gasp-worthy chase sequences & narrow escapes amid crisscrossing tracks & trains, presumably from second unit man Al Alleborn.  Also at his best, young Douglas Fairbanks Jr., just out from a vagrancy charge with soused bud Guy Kibbee, hot to grab anything that comes his way amid the big city hullabaloo & hoi polloi.  And what adventure he finds: a violin case filled with counterfeit cash; a suitcase forgotten by traveling salesman Frank McHugh; swiping a station worker uniform to gain easy access (fair-play Fairbanks returning the ‘borrowed’ loot when possible); meeting-cute with Joan Blondell’s waiting-to-be-rescued chorine (served with a side of tru-love); a dozen more.  And when Fairbanks is inevitably caught, David Landau’s smart, sympathetic police detective there to figure out how dastardly Alan Hale figures into the cleverly designed switchback plot.  Fast & funny, touching & suspenseful, it’s loaded with Pre-Code sexual frankness even when Joan lets us know she’s basically a good girl.  Though under the impression Fairbanks is a rich swell, she’s perfectly willing to offer him 'private time' for a ticket to Salt Lake City.  Turns out, he is swell.  So too the film.

DOUBLE-BILL/SCREWY THOUGHT OF HE DAY: *One of seven writers here, Gene Fowler may have gotten a peek at M-G-M's GRAND HOTEL script from best pal John Barrymore.  Not that he took much, though it would help explain Alan Hale’s German accent.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID: Filmed in ‘31, there’s not much in the way of background music, but use of diegetic sound cues & ambient noise is phenomenal for the period, showing how much Warners was able to do having recently ditched sound-on-disc for sound-on-film.