The Dawn Express (1942)

Ok, so this wartime crime drama wasn't so much edited together as crocheted. The gaps between scenes, the pauses for cues, the telephone conversations by numbers don't help the pace, such as it is, at all. Many of the scenes take place in a tavern where I only hope Strauss was receiving royalty payments, All in all it's a pretty hopeless affair with a really dreary score. The premiss is that some Nazi spies are trying to steal a top secret fuel-enhancing formula and so they try to kidnap/bribe/extort the American scientists working on it to deliver the goods - but these plucky boffins are not just going to capitulate! Can they thwart the dastardly plan? Hans von Twardowski is hilarious (intentionally?) and Constance Worth as the femme fatale "Pavlo" is about as wooden as the chair she so often sits in. To it's credit, the ending is not quite what you expect, but sadly this is little better than a mediocre C-feature that need never see the light of day again.