The film, an ensemble piece for the studio's contract players, also features performances by Guy Kibbee, Alan Hale, Frank McHugh, David Landau, and George Rosener.

[3] Charles "Chic" Miller (Douglas Fairbanks Jr.) is a hobo released from jail for vagrancy, along with fellow drifter "Scrap Iron" Scratch (Guy Kibbee).

She tells him she is an out-of-work chorus girl and is desperate to raise $64 for train fare to Salt Lake City, where a job is waiting for her.

Back inside the depot, a crook named "Bushy" Sloan (Alan Hale) is impersonating a German musician and is carrying a violin case full of counterfeit money.

He hides the case and most of the bogus cash in a small coal bin near the depot, and he instructs Scrap Iron to guard it while he leaves to ponder what to do.

Both Ruth and Chic are then taken into custody by government agents (David Landau, Earle Foxe) searching for criminals exchanging phony money.

Some of these forbidden topics in Union Depot include the following: The film had its New York City premiere at the Winter Garden Theater on January 14, 1932.

The New York Times movie critic, Mordaunt Hall, characterized Union Depot as an "ingenious, rather than artistic" melodrama recalling the contemporary Broadway play Grand Hotel, which was later adapted for the screen.

He noted that some of the dialogue was at times unnecessarily "raw" and that Fairbanks appeared to have "taken a leaf from James Cagney's book, judging by his talk and the way he slaps a girl's face".

[9] Variety also praised the "capital bit of technique" employed in the series of brief scenes at the beginning of the film to establish the plot's tongue-in-cheek attitude toward human behavior.