Film review: Grand Central Murder (1942)

This was a fun one.  It begins with a criminal being transported on a train who gets freed from his handcuffs by a detective who is more concerned with grousing to his partner about how he might miss his date tonight (a long-running joke throughout the film), ostensibly to go to the bathroom, but as soon as the door closes behind him, we hear a crash and he's out the window and away.  He manages to evade capture and bums a dime off a station worker to call someone.  That someone is gold-digging stage star Mida King (an assumed name because she thinks everything she touches turns to gold) whom he tells that he's coming to kill her.  He is her ex-lover "Turk" who (it later transpires) blames her (rightly) for his ex-boss and her next lover framing him for the crime he was in handcuffs for.  Already you get some idea of how byzantine the plot will be.  Well, Mida decides she's going to go hide out in a private train car (did you know such things existed?) on a siding in the titular Grand Central station (the same place, unbeknownst to her, that Turk called her from), even though this is only the interval of her headlining performance in her show.  Of course, this is followed in short order by her being found dead (and naked!) in the bathroom of her train car.  Whodunnit?  Well, there is no shortage of candidates.  Besides Turk, who is captured running away from the train car, there is Turk's nemesis Frankie (played by the oleaginous and ubiquitous Tom Conway, brother of George Sanders, whom we last saw in The Seventh Victim),

who besides also having been dumped by Mira in favor of her next target, the millionaire Mark Henderson (who is the one who found the corpse), stands to lose a bundle if she abandons her stage show, which she told him she planned to do.  There's David's ex-girlfriend Constance Furness, whom he told who he was dumping her for (and who bumped into David on the way to find the corpse), and her father, a railroad bigwig, who also knows.  There's Mira's step-dad, the self-styled psychic Ramon, who had been warning her that he foresaw death for her in the cards, but whom Mira's maid Pearl (who met her when they were both in Burlesque, she on the way down, Mira on the way up, and who is also a suspect because she was fed up with Mira's treatment and the fact that Mira was leaving) claims was always hitting her up for money, and who blames him for leaving "the death card" the ace of spades on the floor of her dressing room, which she saw after Turk's phone call.  There's also Pearl's daughter, who was a failure as Mira's stand in in the second half, and finally Paul Rinehart, Mira's ex-husband from before she was famous, whom she tricked into a divorce but who has always carried a torch for her, and who was also seen running away from the train car, because he actually has a job in the control room of Grand Central.  I've probably forgotten someone, but as you can see: a tangled knot.  Oh, and it includes a detective (and the putative star of the picture) "Rocky" Custer, played by the glamorous be-widows-peaked Van Heflin

who was helping Turk by digging up evidence to prove he was framed, and who was also snooping round the train car with his wife and assistant, whom he insists on calling "Butch".  Everyone is gathered together for questioning in very Agatha-Christie-esque (and very unorthodox for the NYPD, especially when he moves all the suspects around in a big group between the station, Mira's theater, and the train car!) by Inspector Gunther, a cherry cola-guzzling detective played by the also-ubiquitous Sam Levene:

He is half-protagonist, half comic relief, prone to fits of exasperation, especially with Rocky, whom he keeps threatening to throw in jail, immediately before taking his advice.  They have a bet late in the proceedings about who the killer will turn out to be and Gunther, one step behind as always, loses.  It's a fun little romp: as typical for the genre we get to see the events retold from everyone's different point of view, one of the suspects gets poisoned in the police station, Rocky and Frankie have fisticuffs, Turk gets hold of a gun and contemplates taking his revenge on Frankie, and when the killer is finally revealed, they meet their fate in a very fitting way while attempting an escape.  Just the kind of film they don't make any more (although, having said that, Knives Out is just out in the cinemas...).  One oddity, not so much with what's in the film as what isn't: it was made in 1942 and there's not even a single mention of the war.  Even in Jane Austen you at least see soldiers home on leave once in a while.