All Aboard for 10 Memorable Movie Train Rides

Wes Anderson’s fifth feature, “The Darjeeling Limited” follows three estranged brothers on a spiritual journey across India via that most evocative of transportation methods, the train. Many movies have featured dramatic, hilarious or romantic railroad journeys, so narrowing it down to cinema’s ten most memorable train rides is tricky… but we’ll do our best to choo-choo-choose them.

10) Silver Streak (1976)
Gene Wilder plays George Caldwell, a dull book editor who takes the titular train from Los Angeles to Chicago, hoping for a quiet, peaceful trek. But after witnessing a murder on board, he becomes the target of an evil art thief played by Patrick McGoohan. This Hitchcock-lite, despite featuring a fairly exciting climax involving a spectacular train crash, is mostly notable for being the first pairing of the classic (if short-lived) comedy team of Gene Wilder and Richard Pryor (playing a thief who helps Wilder elude capture in part by teaching him how to be black).

9) Von Ryan’s Express (1965)
In this WWII drama, Frank Sinatra plays US Air Force Colonel Joseph Ryan, held in a POW Camp in Italy alongside a group of British soldiers. When Italy surrenders, the prisoners are transported via railroad to Germany. But, led by fearless Frankie, the Allies take over (and we mean ALL over) the train and what follows is some extraordinary, action-packed location shooting through most of Italy, including a sequence in which the train is attacked by Nazi fighter planes! (For another tense WWII era train ride, check out John Frankenheimer’s “The Train,” released that same year.)

8) Back to the Future Part III (1990)
The final film of the time travel trilogy finds Marty McFly (Michael J. Fox) driving the Delorean from 1955 to 1855 in order to save the stranded Doc Brown (Christopher Lloyd) from being killed by Biff’s great-grandfather Buford Tannen (Thomas F. Wilson). When it comes time to again go back to the future, the out-of-gas Delorean needs a push from a speeding locomotive to get up to time-barrier-breaking speed. But that train ride’s nothing compared to the time-traveling locomotive that Doc Brown invents to journey (with his wife and kids) from the old west around the time-space continuum.

7) Some Like it Hot (1959)
After witnessing Chicago’s infamous 1929 St. Valentine’s Day mob hit massacre, struggling musicians Joe (Tony Curtis) and Jerry (Jack Lemmon) need to lam it outta town fast. To that end, the broke musicians take the first job they can get, which turns out to be playing in an all-girl band. Buried under makeup, wigs and other sundry prosthetics, “Josephine” and “Daphne” board a train bound for Florida with the rest of the girls, including the va-va-voomy singer Sugar Kane Kowalczyk (Marilyn Monroe). As the girls squeeze into their cramped berth and start getting ready for bed (there’s barely room for Marilyn), things indeed start to get hot, enough that the Catholic League of Decency gave the film a “C” for Condemned.

6) Mission: Impossible (1996)
The climax of Tom Cruise’s first outing as IMF agent Ethan Hunt finds the superspy battling his ex-boss Jim Phelps (Jon Voight) on France’s high speed TGV line. As their fight continues onto the roof of the train, you can’t help but marvel at how the combatants can keep their footing on a vehicle traveling over 300 mph! Still the awe-inspiring sight of a tethered helicopter being dragged by the train into the UK-connecting Chunnel hammers home the safety advantages of rail vs. air travel.

5) The Lady Vanishes (1938)
The train setting plays prominently in many of Alfred Hitchcock’s films, including his penultimate British thriller. On a journey from Austria to London, a young playgirl named Iris (Margaret Lockwood, giving a smart, sexy performance decades ahead of her time) awakens from a nap to discover that her new friend, the matronly governess Miss Froy (Dame May Whitty) has disappeared. Only nobody on the train seems to remember the woman existing… or so they say. With the help of musical anthropologist Gilbert (Michael Redgrave), Iris unravels a conspiracy and rescues Miss Froy, who turns out to be a British secret agent conveying some McGuffinesque “vital information.” The 2005 thriller, “Flightplan” has much in common with this wildly entertaining mystery, purportedly by coincidence (we say: Suuure).

4) Murder on the Orient Express (1974)
Sidney Lumet directed this star-studded adaptation of the 1934 Agatha Christie mystery, set aboard the legendary luxury line that ran from Istanbul to Paris. Albert Finney plays detective Hercule Poirot, traveling aboard the train when American millionaire Sam Ratchett (Richard Widmark) is stabbed in his cabin (and if you’ve ever been stabbed in your cabin…). It’s up to the erudite Belgian sleuth to deduce the killer amongst an ensemble including Ingrid Bergman, Michael York, Lauren Bacall, John Gielgud, Anthony Perkins and Sean Connery, all gleefully hamming it up in this period whodunit (for which Bergman won an Oscar).

3) From Russia with Love (1963)
Sean Connery made another dangerous trek on the Orient Express nine years earlier in James Bond’s second film, “From Russia with Love.” While transporting a beautiful Russian defector (and the Lektor cryptographic device) to England, 007 is attacked by SPECTRE assassin Red Grant (Robert Shaw) in the cramped confines of Bond’s stateroom. The incredibly brutal fight was filmed not using stunt people, but the actors, who begged to do it themselves.

2) North by Northwest (1959)
New York ad writer Roger Thornhill (Cary Grant) is not having a good day. After being mistaken for a government agent by foreign spies, he’s falsely accused of murdering a diplomat at the UN. Fleeing from the police, he boards a train at Grand Central Station and soon finds a curious ally in the form of an icy blonde named Eve Kendall (Eva Marie Saint). A saucy seduction unfolds over a Gibson and brook trout in the dining car, followed by dessert in Eve’s drawing room. Roger’s suspicious of Eve’s interest in helping him (outside of simple lust), and with good reason: She’s the head spy’s mistress, doing double agent duty for the feds. Arguably Alfred Hitchcock’s most entertaining film also ends with what may be the first use of the now clichéd “train entering tunnel” metaphor.

1) A Hard Day’s Night (1964)
As hard as it is to imagine James Bond using public transportation, it’s even stranger to contemplate the biggest rock group in the world taking the train. But in the Beatles’ first picture, the fab four ride the rails with Paul’s troublemaking (but clean) grandfather, snooty businessmen, and of course, adoring, screaming birds (that’s British slang for girls, kids). For the Beatles at this time, the world was a playground, and the lads make a simple journey by rail seem like an anarchic joyride. But seriously, can you imagine U2 taking Amtrak?

Naturally, we’re barely skimming the surface here. Other memorable train moments occur in “The Manchurian Candidate” (1962, 2004), Fellini’s “8½” (1963), “Strangers on a Train” (1951), “The Cassandra Crossing” (1976), “Superman” (1978), “The Grifters” (1990), “A Passage to India” (1984), “Terror Train” (1980), “The Polar Express” (2004) and we mustn’t forget the Hogwarts Express from the “Harry Potter” series. And that’s not even mentioning commuter trains… a topic we’ll save for another time). Ticket, please!
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ORIGINALLY POSTED in REWIND on MTV.COM, October 2007

To oldly go where no man has gone before

Back when the original “Rocky” was released in 1976, probably not even Sly Stallone himself thought he’d be playing the character thirty years later. “Requiem for a Heavyweight” and “Million Dollar Baby” aside, not too many movies about heavyweight boxers star senior citizens. But at least “Rocky Balboa” is ABOUT the fact that the sexagenarian Italian Stallion may well be too old to step into the ring. Hollywood has certainly set precedents that would allow the sequel to completely avoid the issue of Stallone’s age.

The issue of time is a fluid one in motion picture series. While it may take years for a I to stretch into a II and beyond, the story being told rarely matches production time. In the context of character-based franchises like “Spider-Man,” the characters are supposed to stay relatively the same age, while in something like “Harry Potter,” the maturation of the main character is an integral part of the story. Einstein’s theory of relativity almost feels as if it were designed for movie franchises.

“Harry Potter” is unique in that at this point, the films practically piggy-back J.K. Rowling’s books, and the 7th installment is slated to be the final chapter of the young sorcerer’s tale. Since the books follow through the school years and the movies come so quickly, the actors are able to remain age-appropriate to their characters. It’s hard to imagine that at this point even Rowling herself doesn’t envision the films’ Harry, Daniel Radcliffe as she’s pounding at the keys.

But youth is adaptable, and even if takes years to get the final Harry film onscreen, many twenty-something actors can convincingly play both teens and more mature roles. As an actor passes through middle age, the suspension of disbelief can start to strain. Harrison Ford was in his late thirties when he first strapped on the whip and fedora to play Indiana Jones in 1981’s “Raiders of the Lost Ark,” which is the perfect age for the well-traveled, yet still spry archaeologist. It remained easy to buy Indy’s derring-do in the film’s two sequels over the next eight years, but the prospect of a 64 year old Ford returning to the role in the long-delayed fourth installment feels like it’s pushing it a bit. It’s probably no coincidence that one of the film’s working titles is “Indiana Jones and the Ravages of Time.”

But what about when a character doesn’t age, as in, say James Bond? In Ian Fleming’s original 1953 novel, “Casino Royale” (someone should make a movie out of that), the fledgling superspy is described as being in his mid-30s. Today, despite a 40-plus year history of films that outlasted the Cold War, 007 should still be about the same age. Of the six actors who played the character in the official series, George Lazenby was the youngest at 28. But “On Her Majesty’s Secret Service” (1969) was his only stab at the role, so we never got to see him age into the character. Conversely, Bond #3, Roger Moore, was already 45 when he stepped into the role in 1973’s “Live and Let Die.” Moore would stick with the character for another six films, making him 58 in his final outing, 1985’s “A View to a Kill.”

Now, obviously, Bond the character is not closing in on 60 in the film, but movie magic can only go so far and Moore seems in need of more than just the usual Q gadgets to keep going. You can practically hear Bond’s lumbago acting up as he battles Max Zorin (Christopher Walken) atop the Golden Gate Bridge. And with Stacey Sutton (Tanya Roberts) being perhaps the least appealing Bond girl of them all, you have to wonder how 007 kept his reputation in those pre-Viagra days.

But James Bond the icon is bigger than any actor (yes, even Sean Connery) who’s played him. We can accept new faces behind the Walther PPK. But what happens when characters become so identified with their portrayers that their fans would never go for a replacement, no matter how long in the tooth they get?

What happens is you get “Star Trek V: The Final Frontier.” The 1989 entrant in the series (directed by Captain Kirk himself, William Shatner) finds the Enterprise being hijacked by Spock’s half-brother Sybok (Laurence Luckinbill) in order to breach an energy field known as “The Great Barrier” and reach the planet Sha Ka Ree, the home of… wait for it… God! In fact, “God” turns out to be an evil presence imprisoned on Sha Ka Ree eons ago, but maybe it would’ve been better if the crew of the Enterprise HAD met their maker in this awkward, embarrassing flick.

The movie is filled with ill-advised humor at the expense of the crew, almost all of which were pushing (or past) retirement age at this point. They creak through the movie under the constraints of girdles, wigs, caps and layers of wrinkle-concealing makeup. A mountain-climbing Kirk sports a T-shirt under his Starfleet uniform that says (we kid you not) “Go Climb a Rock,” proving that Spencer Gifts still exists in the 23rd century. An overweight, dottering Scotty (Patrick Doohan) actually konks his head on a doorway and knocks himself out. Even the Enterprise itself, despite being a newly commissioned ship (to replace the one Kirk destroyed at the end of “Star Trek III: The Search for Spock”) is shown as being buggy and clunky, perhaps an unintentioned metaphor for the entire series?

The film was pilloried by the press (as well as the typically more forgiving fans) and the next film, “Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country” (1991) wisely brought a decommission to the original full crew of the Starship Enterprise. And yet It seems as if it took nothing less than the deaths of James Doohan and DeForest Kelley (Dr. McCoy) to finally permit Paramount to recast the original characters in the upcoming reboot helmed by J.J. Abrams (creator of “Lost.”).

Still, Hollywood is so youth-obsessed that there’s probably some karmic balance in the fact that Steven Seagal (at a jowly 55) is still kicking butt and sporting ponytail in action films like this year’s “Attack Force.” Okay, so it’s a horrible, straight-to-video piece of product that doesn’t add anything worthy to the cultural landfill, but at least he’s not a drain on society!

And it’s undeniable that there’s something reassuring in the idea of Stallone returning to the role that made him a respected artist (remember, “Rocky” won the Oscar for Best Picture in 1977), even if that status was fleeting. It’s more believable in the context to think that Rocky Balboa could step back into the ring in his sixties than to think that the 23 year old Kate Bosworth’s Lois Lane is an established Pulitzer Prize winning journalist with a four year old kid in “Superman Returns!” Just goes to show ya, there are times when older is better.
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ORIGINALLY POSTED in REWIND on MTV.COM, December 2006