Ensofter Overrated and overhyped

ThedevilChoose When a movie has you begging for it to end not even half way through it's pure crap. We've all seen this movie and this characters millions of times, nothing new in it. Don't waste your time.

Arianna Moses Let me be very fair here, this is not the best movie in my opinion. But, this movie is fun, it has purpose and is very enjoyable to watch.

Roxie The thing I enjoyed most about the film is the fact that it doesn't shy away from being a super-sized-cliche;

chaos-rampant This is perfectly efficient but still not something I will remember a day from now. Why is this? It has solid noir elements: a blind girl kidnapped, a woman inspiring the detective story of looking for her, men at every corner (cops) looking, waiting. The blind girl in the nested story of the kidnapper, helpless and bounced along by greater forces. I would change not a thing of those. It is all about vision and the visual world love creates.But the film spends itself in just the tight bridging from one element to the next. It lacks the inner tension, that feeling in life of a more pervasive connectedness where we mysteriously encounter some missing part of ourselves that we look for all around us.Noir Meter: 1/4

Spikeopath Union Station is directed by Rudolph Maté and written by Sydney Boehm and Thomas Walsh. It stars William Holden, Nancy Olsen, Barry Fitzgerald, Lyle Bettger, Jan Sterling and Herbert Heyes. Music is by Irvin Talbot and cinematography by Daniel Fapp.When a sharp-eyed woman spots a man with a gun on a train she alerts the railroad police. This is merely the start of the events that lead to the kidnapping of a blind heiress by a ruthless thug...A film of two excellent stages. The first two thirds of the movie is concerned with setting up the crime and fully introducing us to the key characters involved on both sides of the law. Relationships are formed or destroyed and as the railroad police work with the regular police, we the viewers get an in-depth look at the procedures involved in crime solving and averting panic in a busy rail station. Callous violence infiltrates the narrative, with deaths and threats the order of the day (the detectives as well as the perps are not beyond strong arm tactics here), and the bustling station and grimy stockyards locales are superbly utilised as backdrops to the drama.Then the last third arrives and we enter into the stark reality of the crime and mindset of kidnap leader Joe Beacon (Bettger). Dubious morality and the cheapness afforded life is pungent in the air, and then we shift locations underground to the municipal tunnels where Maté and Fapp use the unique settings for a clinically noir world of jeopardy and fret that builds to an exciting and suspense filled cat and mouse finale. The direction is smooth, the editing also seamless, while Holden, Olsen, Bettger and Fitzgerald lead off a roll call of enjoyable performances.Jan Sterling is short changed with a stereotyped character that doesn't get nearly enough screen time, while it's a bit of a stretch to accept the plausibility of Olsen's character's involvement in the unfolding investigation/manhunt. But small quibbles aside, Union Station is a tough, tense and often ruthless crime thriller that's constructed with great skill by the makers. 8/10

filmalamosa Kidnap movie cops win.I found this whole movie fairly amateurish many of the scenes fake looking e.g. the cows breaking down their gate.The kidnap victim is a blind girl a hokey and sickeningly sweet attempt to elicit pathos that failed.In fact her and the nosy obnoxious secretary make you cheer for the bad guys.However the gangsters were hapless.As another reviewer called it shtick.... low budget boiler plate.OK give it a 4Watch only if nothing better around.

dougdoepke Back when America took the train for out-of-town travel, depots were full of hustling, bustling travelers, rather like today's airports. Judging from the opening scenes, you might think half the folks in those stations were petty criminals and the other half were there to catch them. Actually, the movie's a pretty good thriller. The railroad cops are led by Holden who's after a kidnapping gang who've grabbed a blind girl (Allene Roberts), while Barry Fitzgerald heads the local cop contingent.There are some good imaginative touches, such as the stockyard scene, and the final chase through an underground tunnel. These, along with some good location photography and a documentary style approach, help build a general air of suspense. However, the documentary style is also interrupted by rather obvious studio sets, a none-too-convincing romance between Olson and Holden, and the un-cop like musings of Fitzgerald as comedy relief. Thus we're also reminded at critical points that this is, after all, only a movie.The film has gone down in history books for one particularly memorable scene. In the train station, the cops have caught a gang confederate and need to make him tell the where-abouts of the kidnapped girl. At first, the suspect feigns innocence. Now, in standard films of the day, sentencing pressure would have been brought to bear-- how the guy risks execution should harm befall the girl, along with maybe some mild pushing around. Not here. Instead, the guy is hauled into a back room and rather brutally beaten-- already a big departure from the norm. When he still refuses to talk, he's dragged out onto the tracks, where Holden and company dangle him before an on-rushing locomotive. Wild now with fright, the suspect spills his guts. To my knowledge, this is either one of the only films of the time, if not the only one, to show cops not only beating a suspect, but torturing him as well. It comes as a startling departure from what audiences had come to expect from the forces of law and order. How it got past the censors is beyond me.Of course, we already know the guy is a gang member, so we may want to excuse the extreme police methods. But keep in mind that movies are inherently a medium of manipulation. A good film-maker can make an audience root for almost anything or anybody if he loads the deck correctly. Suppose in this case the movie hadn't tipped us off early about the guy's guilt, and suppose the guy turned out to be innocent instead. Would we feel the same way about the police methods. I doubt it, but however you respond, this remains an entertaining 90 minutes with a particularly fine performance from Roberts as the trapped blind girl.