54light15the point of this thread- films with trains but not train films
Someone on another forum pointed out the opening title sequence of Hilda Crane: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VnReNlGSWAc
no trains in the rest of the movie.
Keaton's "Our Hospitality" is a hoot! It features a Stephenson's Rocket type of locomotive pulling a train that couldn't outrun a dog! See it! And then there's "Seven Chances" which features a lot of train and streetcar action, plus a railroad crane where all the gags involve women in bridal gowns. One of his best!
Take care Helmut, you too. And I will tell her.
S. T.
Overmod...I find I don't appreciate Buckwheat any more...
You are aware, I take it, that Buckwheat converted to Islam, changing his name to Kareem of Wheat?
Wayne
rixflixAlso try "Railroading with Our Gang" on Youtube for footage that hopefully never went to distribution. Playing with 1:1 trains can shorten your life kids!
That said, I find I don't appreciate Buckwheat any more, much less with the old 'white with fright' trope. And I myself can't stop reacting every time the locomotive runs over... whether that scene was filmed live, or with a double, or not. It just isn't amusing, even once -- and they do it far more than once.
I do get the impression that episode was done along the same lines as the epic "Play Safe" cartoon, to impress some of the dangers of railroading. Reminds me a bit of that detail in Hazards of Helen where they note the engine is running away with the oil feed and the injector both on, so it won't stop before it reaches disaster...
Overmod A pair of bookends with only "The General" in between for Keaton's railroad trilogy. Rick rixflix Buster Keaton's "Our Hospitality" has possibly the wackiest railroading ever filmed. Wackier than 'The Railrodder'???
A pair of bookends with only "The General" in between for Keaton's railroad trilogy.
Rick
rixflix Buster Keaton's "Our Hospitality" has possibly the wackiest railroading ever filmed.
Wackier than 'The Railrodder'???
rixflix aka Captain Video. Blessed be Jean Shepherd and all His works!!! Hooray for 1939, the all time movie year!!! I took that ride on the Reading but my Baby caught the Katy and left me a mule to ride.
rixflixBuster Keaton's "Our Hospitality" has possibly the wackiest railroading ever filmed.
Buster Keaton's "Our Hospitality" has possibly the wackiest railroading ever filmed.
Also try "Railroading with Our Gang" on Youtube for footage that hopefully never went to distribution. Playing with 1:1 trains can shorten your life kids!
While not really a movie and with a train as a central object, the TV series "Day of the Roses" is set in a Coroner's investigation of a very serious rail accident in Australia in 1977.
The Day Of The Roses-Granville Train crash (FULL FILM) - Bing video
There is a "trailer" which you can watch to see if you might be interested.
DAY OF THE ROSES TRAILER - Bing video
What is interesting is that a complete reproduction set in full scale using real rail vehicles was built in a supermarket parking lot (presumably on a slow couple of weeks for sales) and the bridge collapse on the train was reproduced (seen in the trailer).
The emphasis on local politics may be a little tiring. The main train scenes start 50 minutes or so into the full movie and were filmed at the actual locations for the whole journey using a preserved locomotive of the correct class. Interiors were filmed in the correct type of passenger car.
There are gaps in the original tape to allow TV advertising to be inserted which need to be skipped over.
But an interesting examination of rail safety failures.
Peter
Overmod Some fun rail action in the Roger Moore Bond film Octopussy.
Some fun rail action in the Roger Moore Bond film Octopussy.
The rail scenes were filmed on the Nene Valley Railway in the UK with a Swedish locomotive standing in for the "East German" locomotive on the circus train. But good fun...
"Closely Watched Trains" is a film that should qualify despite it's railfan-magnetic title.
I couldn't watch either "Trainspotters" or "Track 29" to their termini.
Still Rick
There is so much in "Black Orpheus" to marvel at. Rio, Carnival, music, samba, the favela, and of course the tragic story. But Orfeu is a streetcar motorman and the rides are wonderfully charming. A magical film.
Sara T- that is exactly the point of this thread- films with trains but not train films. Pictures like Runaway Train, The Train, The Lady Vanishes great as they are, are not really what I was after when I started this thread. Thanks for posting those!
Here I found something funny, a film with a train but not a train film:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KsgJC6brhgc
Mr Bean on the train, scene 4 1/2 min
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hEgYTVOJE50
Mr Bean on a TGV, 9 min
Sara
For Atlantic Crossing, I'm guessing that they might have used the Swedish equipment from the Hull-Wakefield train in Quebec. The train used on that line is still in North America, not sure where but the HW closed down when the track was washed out years ago.
PBS started a series called Atlantic crossing. The opening scenes were of a train trip by the Norway crown prince and his wife going to FDR's residence. The train definitely was not North American, Car interiors were definitely European and the outside had open vestibules with the cars a bright green in color. Did not catch if the car(s) had buffers,
Later in first episode hour those same type cars were shown in a Norway train but not same color.
You two should stop this - you never get to where ends meet.
=J=
The concordance between the films is obvious: they claim to be from the same novel, by the same author.
That they are very different from each other and the novel is obvious, but you should read others for sense as carefully as you yourself claim to want to be read.
The Writer's Guild is the 'union' for script changes in Hollywood.
By Lantier of course I meant the Zola character, not Renoir's imitation. He is subject to neurotic rages against women in the book and that was a reason for the female character in the book to presume his ability and willingness for similar rage to murder in general. Ford's character in the Lang movie is very different, I said this clearly, you seem devoted to missing the point. There is much more psychological drama in this movie than just violence.
Part of film noir came out of the pulp fiction tradition, which had as its stock-in-trade far more vicious violence against women than anything pretended in these movies, often with far more inherent misogyny. Much early science fiction is now almost unreadable for those reasons alone. Surely I sympathize with any women made victims of institutionalized violence, especially when 'socially sanctioned' but it is difficult to steer a discussion of trains in movies to hammer on that sole point just because you want to, then make fun of people who don't appear to agree fully enough immediately. I agree, full stop. Especially if the subject is painful. We'll go back to trainwatching.
Incidentally, the GE 44-tonner is the small switcher that pulls cars, like a merciful curtain, across the scene where the murder is supposedly about to take place.
I was starting to type more about railroaders... but I see the Kalmbach gremlins are playing tonight and the page keeps resetting. That is probably a sign for me to stop.
(Another night I can't sleep ...)
Overmod,
Hoooo .. you have a way to write a whole novel about a topic that could be cleared with one sentence.
Please note that this topic really is painful for me, I don't like to discuss the deficits of that film in scrutinizing detail because they cause me pain!
Still, ok, I will answer your's because I don't want to leave my post misunderstood:
>>Was the Crawford character typical of a railroader at an earlier stage of history<<
That is not the point! I never remarked on that at all. What I remarked upon was the character of a violent husband he played there and in that he was so convincing that it became hard for me to watch! Please try, at least try!, to put yourself into the position of an average woman, probably 1/4 of his physical strength and less willing to become violent. Me, I have not come into such situations because I'm taller than most men and it looks like they avoid messing with a woman they have to look up to. But I can still imagine what horror it is to be plainly at the will of such a man, in good or in bad! Unfortunately, it seems you can't.
>>and which plastered caboose walls with images of unattainable (and, if you think about it, incomprehensible) women ... then expose them to a young, attractive, "available" but flawed woman<<
What is an "incomprehensible" woman? This is the old stereotype of "women are irrational and cannot be understood"? The last part is like the reasoning for women have to wear this full-body covering in Islam: men are not responsible for "falling" for an "available" woman! Is that what you think? I don't believe it!
>>with Lang's eye for composition and blocking, right up to the point the 44-tonner and cars obscure the imminent altercation. <<
?? where is a "44 tonner"?
>>and there you'd be, having to call Writer's Guild West on the '50s equivalent of speed-dial and having to pay for a bunch of rapid rewriting to recover something<<
Ok, perhaps my English comes to its limit here but I feel like this is one of your less understandable sentences. If you like you could explain it, but ok, never mind.
>>Whether that would have given you a better movie, or whether a better 'leading man' would have worked better in this one, I can't say. <<
On the opposite! I wrote that in his role as a diesel driver he was good!
>>Who would you suggest for the 'bored diesel driver'? (Perhaps more to the point, who would you suggest to play Jacques Lantier from the original?)<<
Tzzzzh! No, I never mentioned a thing like that! The Lang film has very little if any resemblance to the Renoir film to me. Its whole essence is different. Only because here and there you have men working on the railway doesn't make the films comparable. I am not an expert on railroads, but I know about filmmaking and I see no concordance between those two films. In your railroad approach: the one plays in France in steam time, the other in the USA and in times of changeover to diesels, you only hear steam in the background. To me: the French film portrays the agony of a sick man (I don't see that "she is fully aware of Lantier's murderous willingness (willingness!? there is a scene where the whistle of a locomotive makes him awake from his madness and he feels banjaxed)" ), the other portrays the wrongs and constrictions of the 1950s society, even if that perhaps wasn't the main intention then. But Lang as a filmmaker sometimes did films that seemed to have come a bit out of his hands in what they told. That was so in his famous science fiction film "Metropolis".
You expect people to read through your long postings, but I feel you are not prepared to read other people's postings carefully, at least not mine.
Please think about it. At present I don't feel like I'm understood here.
In Sullivan's Travels, Joel McCrea's character wanted to make a film called "Oh Brother Where Art Thou." The Coen brothers movie of that name is the film that they imagined that he made and there is a sort of railroad scene in it of the characters riding on a handcar. I loved that picture and the music!
McCrea was a great actor, especially in westerns. "Ride the High Country" with Randolph Scott is superb!
Here's another western where a train is a key part of the film but it's not a train movie- "The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance." One of John Ford's best.
On the lighter side, a movie I watch a couple of times a year is "Sullivan's Travels". This film was probably mentioned early on in this long thread and possibly by me. Recommended to me by my dad when he was about 90 years old. Still funny.
Every time October 4 comes around I commemorate "Broderick Crawford Day", as in 10/4. According to his bio sources he wouldn't have had much trouble with the drinking scenes and that may have been real hooch in the film. But give him his due, he was a pro and did show (or sober) up for a lot of stuff, most notably as Willie Stark.
Alfred Hitchcock also managed to get trains into several flicks besides "North by Northwest". Don't know if he was an acknowledged or closet railfan.
I think there was a "Sky King" episode that may have been based on the City of San Francisco wreck.
Did you notice the difference in signals ? Searchlight,position lights, three aspect stacked.,Semaphores, and a couple others. As well the pole lines were definitely out of the 40s and 50s, Santa Fe classic location on the transcon where other pictures had the diesels refueled.
Trento sign on bridge, What appeared to be Washington Union station
Sara TOh, I see you all are completely unaware of anything not strictly railroad matters. You notice exactly where the train scenes were filmed and ridicule about how it doesn't fit together but you never look at the broader story the film tells about how society then was restricted and lived on false demands and requirements or guidelines.
Neither Lang's nor Renoir's film takes up many of the societal issues Zola raises. Lang in fact turns Zola on his head, perhaps to suit American tastes ... whereas in Zola she is fully aware of Lantier's murderous willingness, in the Lang version she presupposes it -- supposedly because he 'killed' in wartime, without comprehending in the least how males have dealt with that issue in the wars of the Twentieth Century,, successfully or unsuccessfully. Here, in Lang's version, that attempt at manipulation not only falls flat; Ford's character realizes that everything in the whole business has been a manipulation. And with that, he's done. Note the byplay with the "precious" letter, which seals this as much as any film trope could.
When the girl comes clean at the end -- she intends it as a great epiphany -- that the affair with her 'godfather' was entirely her idea and her plan, even that comes across as if manipulation, as if we should believe that any more than anything else she's tried. And the filmmaker takes a cheap and lazy way out -- even death takes on a childish and unconvincing sort of appearance, just another poorly-mimed brutish act mostly offscreen as if to save Hays Office sensibilities.
Meanwhile, Gabin had wanted to make a film about locomotives -- probably something we'd all love to post about in detail here. Blundering about for a plot involving trains, they settled on Zola ... but mainly for the name recognition. As they worked on it, smoking their Gauloises into the wee hours, they found themselves cribbing scenes more and more from their probably dog-eared copy of La Bete Humaine ... but apparently not understanding all that much of what the points of the story Zola intended were.
That's not to say you can't make a cracking good film noir or expose of human foibles on the general subject, but that isn't all a good adaptation ought to do. Here, in the Renoir the railroading is almost peripheral, not even a necessary plot device; in the Lang we keep coming up against what we all know of railroading and finding so little of the plot and the characters reflecting the reality. Even one of those Eddie Sand stories with the empire builder's daughter falling in love with the railroad hero had more ... well, relevance to what interests the people actually knowledgeable about or interested in railroading, rather than just trains in the background or as a plot device.
Was the Crawford character typical of a railroader at an earlier stage of history? well, that would have been truly interesting to consider -- constant danger, low quality of life and no prospect of real advancement, always tired and drinking and booming -- the culture out of which the Big Rock Candy Mountain song came, and which plastered caboose walls with images of unattainable (and, if you think about it, incomprehensible) women ... then expose them to a young, attractive, "available" but flawed woman and watch what happens.
The problem is that that wouldn't give you a four-quadrant movie, or even something telling the sort of happy-ending-for-the-hero-villains-get-their-comeuppance story that sold in cinema in the postwar years. Here, the movie stays tense, with Lang's eye for composition and blocking, right up to the point the 44-tonner and cars obscure the imminent altercation. Past that, right up to the point Ford says he couldn't kill him. Then it all goes to pieces. That was the place for all the complex relationships between people 'pretending to be someone they never were or could be' started to play out against each other, as the flawed characters themselves would have seen it. Instead we get a bunch of stereotypes -- perhaps very good stereotypes; had Gloria Grahame actually had lines to work with, she could have been magnificent in creating a character... but it turns into mere screenwriting, and worse, we can't ignore it. Fortunately, perhaps, we can try to read the builder's plates or guess why the diesel-engine idle changes between shots... things the filmmakers lovingly captured without tinkering with them.
Personally I thought Ford was reasonably good in that part, for the same reasons Cameron cast Arnold Schwartzenegger as the lead in the Terminator -- the woodenness was the life. Were he sophisticated, or more complex a character, he would have seen through the manipulation at some earlier point ... and there you'd be, having to call Writer's Guild West on the '50s equivalent of speed-dial and having to pay for a bunch of rapid rewriting to recover something that would give you an ending to fit. Whether that would have given you a better movie, or whether a better 'leading man' would have worked better in this one, I can't say. Who would you suggest for the 'bored diesel driver'? (Perhaps more to the point, who would you suggest to play Jacques Lantier from the original?)
Hey Sara, I'm sure the guys get the point of the film, but the problem is if you're a railfan you just can't ignore the glaring errors as far as the trains are concerned, they jump right out at us!
Movies rely on what's called "The willing suspension of disbelief" on the part of the audience. Certainly anyone watching that film knows that's not a real railroad engineer, it's Glen Ford playing an engineer, but when the "disbelief" kicks in it doesn't matter anymore. The problem is that "disbelief" is a tenuous thing, and it can be broken when an audience member spots something that's just not right. In this movie it can be the wrong train in the wrong place, something a railfan's going to notice. In a Western it can be the wrong guns in the wrong time period, in a war movie it can be the wrong tanks, in some films it can be the wrong cars, there's a number of things that can break the spell.
Sometimes knowledge is a curse! You sure don't want to be in a room with me when I'm watching a historical-themed film!
I'll agree with you about Glen Ford, a fine actor, but he seemed to be better suited to roles set in contemporary society rather than in Westerns.
Oh, I see you all are completely unaware of anything not strictly railroad matters. You notice exactly where the train scenes were filmed and ridicule about how it doesn't fit together but you never look at the broader story the film tells about how society then was restricted and lived on false demands and requirements or guidelines. This was a society where everybody just pretended to be someone he never was nor ever could be. In reality, they all fell behind what they pretended to be. Even this do-gooder (Gutmensch, you find the proper translation) played by Glen Ford pretty easily falls to take profit of a difficult situation this wife of Crawford is in. Before he even knows her he kisses her, not very convincing. Later, rather unconvincingly the plot is here too, she wants to persuade him to murder (!) her husband (although it is portrayed he has become unbearable) and then (I was surprised then, because he had come home from war) he failed to do so. No, forget all those unfitting railroad items, it was not filmed for the knowing enthusiasts. But Crawford was (to me at least) fitting for the role in a frightening way, he was convincing to the point it told how it was in reality. Glen Ford was good in his portrayal of the bored diesel driver, hardly a thing to do but just sit there in this crumpled gesture one foot up on some installation, not too comfortable. But the other scenes were so-so. At least he didn't look so out of time as in some of his Western movies as a cowboy where he rode the horses like a station wagon.
Something I find interesting is that neither Renoir's nor Lang's version contains two elements of Zola's story: the almost Psycho-like rages the engineer suffers (NB he has no such issues with La Lison!) and the implied horror of the last scene, where they topple from the footplate, leaving the train running at full speed as the soldiers behind wisecrack and play, unaware that their lives are all measured in minutes...
BaltACDDon't overlook the ACL passenger train it passed on the way during the opening.
No one has apparently mentioned using FAs on long passenger trains. Not for any lack of PAs to be used as motion-picture props by 1954!
Sara T- If you liked "The Streets of San Francisco" then you will surely like "Naked City" a police series set in New York that is based on the 1948 film noir, "The Naked City" from 1948, directed by Jules Dassin.
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