Union Station (1950)

Union Station (1950) is a kidnap and ransom police thriller set in and around Chicago's Union Station, and starring William Holden and Nancy Olsen.

The film was based on Nightmare in Manhattan, an Edgar-winning novel by Thomas Walsh.

Sydney Boehm's script for the film version was nominated for an Edgar in the screenplay category.

Aside from changing the setting from New York City's Grand Central Station to Chicago's Union Station (though the Los Angeles Union Station was the actual filming location), and changing the kidnap victim from a little boy to a blind, teen-aged girl, the script was quite faithful to its source material.

Union Station is a realistic 1950 film noir police and public nuisance kidnap movie starring William Holden, Nancy Olson, Jan Sterling and Barry Fitzgerald. It was released after Sunset Boulevard so by the time it came out, Holden had actually moved up another level of stardom. William Holden and Nancy Olson also appeared in Sunset Boulevard the same year.

A busy Union Station (1950)

Jan Sterling is the gangster's girlfriend with a heart, although given how heartless this villain is she is maybe not making that much of a reach. The excitement is a pleasant noir surprise: the final shootout in a tunnel below the station is great and shows our bad-man (Lyle Bettger) being tracked down by tracked down by hard-boiled Holden so that the kidnapped blind girl (Allene Roberts) can be returned safely to her father.

Super-villain Bettger has arranged a ransom for the girl to the tune of $100,000 and is determined to keep a grip on the suitcase containing the money.

Nancy Olson and William Holden in Union Station (1950)

In 1933 the FBI suffered the worst loss of personal in its youthful history when four agents were ambushed while escorting some prisoners.

William Holden in Union Station (1950)

The four men were machine-gunned to death as were the two prisoners but as a result J. Edgar Hoover insisted that Congress pass legislation allowing F.B.I. men to carry arms into the field, something that had previously been rejected as a proposition. The killings were later ascribed to "Pretty Boy" Floyd's gang, but nobody was ever punished for the killings.

The incident happened in the parking area of Union Station in Kansas City and in fact is historically referred to as "The Union Station Massacre".

Villain Lyle Bettger is almost a psychotic noir bad guy and although he does enjoy taunting his victims, he does keep his focus on the ransom money. He has spent five years in prison for a hold-up, although he crossly dismisses this event, referring to it as a "coffee and cake" affair, and it was in prison that he thought up this unique new master crime, all focused on the station.

For a movie filmed in 1950, Union Station has at times a peculiarly hard punch, notably in the police tactics adopted by William Holden's character Lieutenant William "Don't Call Me Willie" Calhoun. When the moment is right Calhoun wastes no time in employing the roughest of tactics, and with the support of his rather large team, is happy to brutalise a witness in order to get hold of vital information.

What is most surprising of all when this happens in Union Station — a good 21 years before Dirty Harry normalised such police tactics as to make them almost de regeur — is that Barry Fitzgerald joins in too.

Fitzgerald, a character actor who in 1950 would have been known to audiences for his roles as a kindly Irishman, sometimes a priest, as joining in with the rough tactics. When the police capture and gang up on one witness, Vince Marley played by Fred Graff, they take him to a quiet platform and get ready to push him in front of a speeding train.

Herbert Heyes in Union Station (1950)

Lyle Bettger in Union Station (1950)

This is when Fitzgerald calmly and kindly says: "Make it look accidental" — a sentiment which elevates Union Station from any police procedural pretension that it may have and nudges it more towards the realms of the noir masterwork.

Lyle Bettger and Jan Sterling in Union Station (1950)

There are a variety of fascinating settings in Union Station, including several types of train, such as the overlander which kicks off the plot and carries key witness and female seeker hero Joyce Willecombe to Chicago in the first place.

There is a tense and fascinating cat and mouse pursuit which take place on the overhead, quite reminiscent in its way of scenes from the much later The French Connection (1971). Indeed, some of the ducking through doors, cop-switching and train changing in Union Station did in fact go on to become immortal tropes in the cop genre, when tracking hoods and perps in major cities. There is a lot of good rail, railyard and locomotive spotting, including some unusual pre-surveillance camera spy-holing.

Then there is the station itself which provides plenty great dramatic opportunities, with the crowds, baggage checks and the Information Desk where William Holden is often shiftily situated, ducking down to make not very surreptitious calls to his team.

Spy-holing in Union Station (1950)

Under the station too, there is a secondary world of service tunnels and machine rooms which make for a great industrial denouement, and a tertiary zone too, which are locomotive service tunnels where William Holden and Lyle Bettger face off at the last. These tunnels are more reminiscent of mine shaft tunnels and have an odd feel to them that seems rough and deadly, certainly not urban.

Speaking of the urban however, Union Station does have the most excellent serving of sound0staged city streets of noir, with many great locations created for various scenes which involve automobiles and roadways. There are a few of these and they are expansive and detailed in a manner which seems to indicate a kind of perfection in the mis en scene.

The film noir street scenes of Rudolph Maté's Union Station (1950) don't have the same reality as the train station scenes, as they are movie settings as opposed to a real life setting used for a movie. The effect though is to create two worlds, the world of the station where Lieutenant William "Don't Call Me Willie" Calhoun is boss, and the wider more unpredictable world, where the criminals are at large. Calhoun gets furious about being called Willie, he is such a hard ass about it it is quite the nice surprise. A lonely noir cop.

Lyle Bettger

Most unusual of all and very likely unique in film noir, is the cattle yard which the action crosses after the lengthy cat and mouse on the city's railway network. Here there is a decent chase and a grisly death. It may be the case that a proper steer stampede does for the odd baddie in many a western. But not many film noir villains meet their justified end by being mashed in a sudden frenzied smash of cows.

Nancy Olson, Herbert Heyes, Barry Fitzgerald in Union Station (1950)

Evil Joe Beacom winds up with a cool raft of noir lines, in a constant threatening stream of sublimated violence which is the dark battery power which keeps the restless universe of noir alive and flickering drom the dark.

Marge Wrighter: Gonna send that kid home, aren't you, Joe? I mean after we collect.
Joe Beacom: She'll go home... they ever fish her out of the river. Let's have the coffee, huh?

and

Lorna Murchison: You will let my father go, won't you?
Joe Beacom: [Flippantly] Why should I hurt the old boy or you, Cookie? I don't bit the hand that feeds me a hundred grand.

and

Joe Beacom: [Sadistically to Lorna about the high tension cables that are all around her] All you gotta do, Cookie, is get up and take a walk. You'll fry so fast it'll curl your hair.

Train spotters will see the Santa Fe “El Capitan” billboard boxcar in the background at the stockyard scene, as well as a Pacific Electric streetcar which takes him to the yard.

Barry Fitzgerald as the avuncular yet tough cop in Union Station (1950)

Train spotters will also enjoy the sight of train SP 4337, a 4-8-2 Class Mt-3 “Mountain” resting with coaches at LAUPT as the train’s conductor introduces Nancy Olsen to Bill Holden.

On the rails and underground maximum action unfolds in the concluding scenes of Union Station, as we visit some kind of underground freight railway between stations.

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