"Sleepers West," originally titled "Sleepers East," is one of the most enjoyable of the seven Michael Shayne detective mysteries from Sol Wurtzel's B-picture unit at Fox. This entry, however, is not based on any of the scores of Shayne pulps written by Brett Halliday, but on a novel by Frederick Nebel, notable as the first star writer of the legendary BLACK MASK magazine in the 1920's. Although Nebel licensed his most famous character, Torchy Blaine, to the movies in the 1930's, he held Hollywood in contempt and avoided adapting any of his material to the screen.
The film's premise has Shayne covertly escorting a secret surprise witness to a high-profile San Francisco trial aboard a cross-country passenger train. While trying to keep her location and identity a secret, he also has to contend with sinister on-board forces that are trying to silence her. The setting of a sleeping car has traditionally been an intriguing background for thrillers from Hitchcock's "The Lady Vanishes" to Sidney Lumet's "Murder on the Orient Express," and the restrictions of narrow dining cars and narrower sleeping berths, the incessantly repetitive sound of the train's mechanics, and the readily available supply of red herrings add an air of claustrophobic excitement to the proceedings.
If the film's plot of a secret witness threatened by sinister forces sounds familiar, it is because that entire premise was later borrowed without attribution for the highly-acclaimed 1952 Noir thriller, "The Narrow Margin" directed by Richard Fleischer. It was remade in 1990 with Gene Hackman under the same title and credited the '52 film as the source. Despite the fact that "Sleepers West" is largely ignored and forgotten, as is the entire Shayne series, one must wonder why it receives so little attention.
A possible explanation lies with Fox's conception of the Shayne persona. The original Halliday stories were largely ignored by the studio's screenwriters, and the tough, no-nonsense character of Shayne himself was reshaped for the wise-cracking, breezy style of actor Lloyd Nolan, who bears little resemblance to Halliday's hard-boiled gumshoe.
No matter. "Sleepers West" and the other series entries are great escapist fun, filled with sharply witty dialogue and some of Hollywood's most idiosyncratic character actors at their peak, including Mary Beth Hughes, George Chandler, Eddie Brophy, and, in possibly the best role of his lengthy career, Louis Jean Heydt. "Sleepers West" also gives significant screen time to some of best black comedians of Hollywood's Golden Age as Pullman porters. Those of you who remember and appreciate the unsung talents of Mantan Moreland, Ben Carter (Moreland's old nightclub partner), Fred "Snowflake" Toones, and Sam "Deacon" McDaniel are in for an enjoyable 74 minutes.
