"The Silk Express" was a pretty exciting movie. I think it adds an element of excitement when a murder mystery occurs on a moving vehicle as opposed to the standard mansion.
Donald Kilgore (Neil Hamilton) and his silk consortium needed to get a silk shipment from Seattle to New York in three days or less. The entire train was at Kilgore's disposal. At the same time an unscrupulous businessman named Wallace Myton (Arthur Hohl) was trying to prevent that train from ever reaching New York. He and his consortium of businessmen purchased all the available silk in the area which gave them a monopoly on the product. Silk clothing manufacturers would have to buy from them at their price or have no silk at all. The only way around Myton was to buy from Japan and have it shipped to New York. Of course, that takes time and ran the risk of Kilgore not fulfilling his contracts which meant financial ruin.
What it came down to was one set of businessmen versus another set of businessmen. Wealthy businessmen are not necessarily the ideal protagonists which is one of the two quibbles I had with this movie. The other had to do with the ending and the feeling that it was unresolved.
As viewers we knew that Myton had a few agents of his on the train to either prevent it from reaching New York or disrupt it so that it didn't reach New York on time. What we didn't know was who the three agents were. Two of them were readily identified while the third, his ace up his sleeve, was unknown.
As things happened (even a murder) it wasn't clear who was causing the disruptions. It could've been any number of people. There was Clark (Arthur Byron), the conductor, Prof. Axel Nyberg (Dudley Digges) who was supposedly suffering from sleeping sickness, Dr. Harold Rolph (Vernon Steele), the professor's doctor, Robert Griffith (Allen Jenkins), the tramp, or Mr. Calhoun (Robert Barrat), the attorney hired by Kilgore. It was hard to know who was working for Myton which made the movie interesting.
Also of note in the movie were Sheila Terry and Guy Kibbee. Sheila Terry played the daughter of the professor and Guy Kibbee played McDuff, a railway detective who was aboard the train to investigate a murder. He was only doing his job, but he was a direct impedance to Kilgore's progress.
I liked this murder mystery because of the added element of the timeline. Sure, there was a murder to solve, but at the same time the train had to reach New York by a certain time to avoid a financial catastrophe.
Free on Internet Archive.
