The Dawn Express

Lured into a trap by a Mata Hari... the lives of his loved ones was the price demanded for his honor!

Action Adventure War
62 min     4     1942     USA

Overview

A Nazi spy ring is after a chemical formula that increases the power of ordinary gasoline for U.S. Army aviation use. Two U.S. chemical companies are developing the formula, with each working on half for security purposes. The spies get half the formula and know that either of two chemists, Robert Norton or Tom Fielding, knows the rest. They capture Fielding, through a ruse by gang member Linda Pavlo, and threaten the life of his sister Nancy and his mother if he does not give them the formula. To protect his friend Fielding, who does know the formula and is engaged to Nancy, Tom pretends to know the secret and boards the Dawn Express plane with the spy leader and his gang.

Reviews

CinemaSerf wrote:
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.

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