Sleepers West (20th Century-Fox, 1941)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2022 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Late last night my husband Charles and I watched Sleepers West, the second film in the 20th Century-Fox series of seven mystery “B” movies based on the pulp-magazine character of Michael Shayne, private investigator. Shayne was the creation of pulp writer Davis Dresser, who perhaps because his rather “nancy” name would have zero credibility as an action writer, wrote in all the major pulp genres and signed his mystery novels “Brett Halliday.” It’s occurred to me that maybe he should have reversed the names, called his detective “Brett Halliday” and signed the stories about him “Michael Shayne.” Later he would actually lend his name to a pulp magazine called Michael Shayne’s Mystery Magazine, an honorific usually used for actual people like Alfred Hitchcock and quasi-real people like Ellery Queen. The same publishers asked Raymond Chandler to lend his name to a proposed pulp magazine called Raymond Chandler’s Mystery Magazine, but Chandler was incensed that under the contract they offered him, he was to have no editorial input whatsoever, and Chandler indignantly wrote a friend, “They are only vaguely aware that their offer is an insult.”

Anyway, of the Michael Shayne mystery movies Charles and I have been working our way through recently (some of them on YouTube posts and some on a Fox boxed set originally released in the late 2000’s; it was called Michael Shayne Mysteries, Volume 1 but, alas, there never was a Volume 2), the one I ran last night was the second, Sleepers West. It wasn’t based on any of the “Brett Halliday” Shayne stories (of the Fox movies only the first one, Michael Shayne, Private Detective, was based on a “Halliday” work) but on a considerably older novel by Frederick Nebel called Sleepers East. Nebel wrote the original novel and it was published in 1933; the next year the pre-20th Century incarnation of Fox bought the movie rights and made the first film in 1934, retaining the original title and with a script by future Hollywood 10 blacklisted Lester Cole, with Wynne Gibson in the lead role of a woman being escorted across the country on a train as a reluctant witness in a major trial. For this version the title was changed to Sleepers West and the direction of travel was reversed, so the train carrying the rel;uctant witness, Helen Carlson (a marvelously hard-edged performance by Mary Beth Hughes), is moving from Denvere to San Francisco.

Like Michael Shayne, Private Detective, Sleepers West was directed by Eugene Forde and co-written by Stanley Rauh, though in this case Lou Breslow is his co-writer instead of Manning O’Connor. (Rauh and O’Connolr would work together again on the third film in the series, Dressed to Kill.) I had watched this film with Charles when I got the Shayne boxed set and I’d written about it for moviemagg back then, though I’d posted my comments on an omnibus review of all four films in the set (plus two episodes of a short-lived Shayne TV series in the 1950’s with Richard Denning as Shayne) rather than specifically on this one. I’d remembered the film as a good deal better than it seems now, though even then I complained about the sheer number of red herrings thrown at us by the writers as well as the campy characters, including the engineer and his assistant, both cornball “Irish” types who seem to have wandered in from a John Ford movie. The engineer, McGowan (Oscar O’Shea – so both the character and the actor have hard-core Irish names!), is lamenting that his employers are going to take the worn-out locomotive out of service after this run, and it’s become a point of pride with him to get the final run of his train to San Francisco on schedule.

He takes it as a personal insult when the train is repeatedly delayed so some railroad big-shot can get on it, including the order he gets to stop at an out-of-the-way station called Avondale to pick up Everett Jason (Louis Jean Heydt) – by the way, one of the few character names retained from the original film from 1934 – who we assume is an embezzler and a hit man because he’s carrying a suitcase containing $10,000 in cash and he has an overall sinister air about him. I’ve long thought it weird that Heydt, this incredibly handsome and quite talented actor, never rose through the ranks to stardom; instead he stayed mired in the “B” character-actor ranks virtually his entire career. Shayne is traveling with his ex-girlfriend, hard-bitten reporter Kay Bentley (Lynn Bari), obviously a warm-up for Nebel’s future creation of Torchy Blane, who’s trying to get an exclusive interview with Helen Carlson, whom Shayne has sneaked onto the train by putting her in a drak outfit and having her wear a black wig. His plan is to literally lock her in her compartment for the entire train ride, but no sooner has Helen alone in the compartment than she takes off the dress and wig and reveals herself in all her blonde glory. Charles thought tyere were far too many subplots in the movie, a complaint I had about it back in 2009, and after it was over he joked that the only cdliché Nebel, Rauh and Breslow had missed was the terminally ill child being rushed across country to San Francisco to get the one drug that can cure him or her.

This time around Sleepers West didn’t seem like as good a story as it had 13 years ago, though one good thing I liked about it was the breathy intonations of Mary Beth Hughes’ character. She really comes off as a sort of beta version of Marilyn Monroe, with the same combination of secuality and innocence that made Monroe a superstar a decade or so later. The chilling relationship between her and Heydt’s characters – it turned out he saved that money instead of stealing it (at least that’s what he tells us, though I’m not sure we’re supposed to believe him), and he was running out on a boring marriage and respectable middle-class lifestyle which she urges him to return to – is unusually well-crafted (and Production Code-limit pushing) for the era. Also a legitimate surprise is that Callahan, the (unseen) crook whom Helen is traveling to San Francisco to testify in his trial, is really innocent of this particular charge (though Shayne recalls personally busting him for burglary years before when Snayne was a San Francisco cop), and the bad guys include attorney Tom Linscott (Donald Douglas, usually a good guy as in Murder, My Sweet), Kay Berntley’s current fiancé snd part of a corru9pt political machine which seeks to get a gubernatorial candidate named Wentworth elected on the strength of railroading the innocent Callahan. It’s a pity no one at Fox thought of having a third go at this story in the early 1950’s when Marilyn Monroe was pleading with them to give her more roles with real definition and character complexity instead of casting her as an animate sex doll in one stupid romantic farce after another!