[PROGRAMMING NOTE: VanRamblings won’t publish Saturday, Sept. 3rd thru Monday, Sept. 5. We’ll resume regular posting on Tuesday, Sept. 6th].
As a boy growing up in the 1950s and 60s, a part of each summer was given over to train travel with my mother and sister, to the Calgary Stampede, Edmonton’s Klondike Days, to Saskatoon or Regina, or out to Winnipeg.
There was nothing I cherished more than to arise at sunrise, standing between the trains cars, the summer prairie winds blowing across my face, as I gazed upon mile after mile of blonde fields of bluish green or mustard-yellow flowering and deeply scalloped gently rolling hills of oil-rich rapeseed.
All of which is to say, trains hold much for me in the recall of my life.
Cinema and trains go together like no other form of transport. Equal parts romantic and thrilling, they offer a sense of unequaled escapism.
Whether it’s the tearful goodbyes of Casablanca, the secretive affair of Brief Encounter, the epic crash of The Fugitive, the chase scenes of The General, the fateful encounter in Before Sunrise, the comings and goings of trains have been used to give metaphorical dynamism to countless films.
Trains are so popular that entire stories have been set on them.
This is due to the way they are able to keep action moving forward as its characters are forced to occupy the same physical space. From action thrillers to class commentaries to classic whodunnits, here are a few films set on a train that you’ll want to board should you be afforded the opportunity.
The Lady Vanishes (1938)
Perhaps the best of all Alfred Hitchcock’s British films, The Lady Vanishes tells the story of a young woman traveling across Europe who suddenly realizes her elderly traveling companion has disappeared. Containing endless twists as well as a pre-WW2 espionage subplot, The Lady Vanishes offers a delightful concoction that doubles as a study of British mannerisms, and the classic 1930s era of train travel.
The Commuter (2018)
Billed as an actioner, there are surprising depths to Jaume Collet-Serra’s train-based thriller The Commuter, starring Liam Neeson as a former police officer turned insurance agent who has just been laid off from his job, the majority of the film taking place on a Manhattan commute. While the thrills are thrilling and the action sequences accomplished, The Commuter has a socioeconomic depth that makes this Neeson’s most profound action film.
Unstoppable (2010)
As fast, loud, and relentless as the train at the centre of the story, Unstoppable is perfect popcorn entertainment — and proved to be director Tony Scott’s best movie in years, the narrative involving an unmanned runaway train carrying a cargo of toxic chemicals, and an engineer (Denzel Washington) and his conductor (Christ Pine) who find themselves in a race against time.
Murder on the Orient Express (1974)
Director Sidney Lumet’s agent called it “the dumb train movie” but the cast — Albert Finney as Hercule Poirot, and suspects including Lauren Bacall, Sean Connery, Martin Balsam, Jacqueline Bissett, John Gielgud, and Ingrid Bergman, who won the Oscar for Best Supporting Actress — gives this mystery the feel of a luxurious chocolate-box with few toffees. “Stylistically it had to be gay in spirit, even though it was about a murder,” Lumet said of the film.
Source Code (2011)
Finding the human story amidst the action, director Duncan Jones and a charming Jake Gyllenhaal craft a smart, satisfying sci-fi thriller about decorated soldier Captain Colter Stevens, who wakes up in the body of an unknown man on a commuter train, to discover he’s part of a mission to find a bomber.
Europa (1991)
Director Lars von Trier boxed himself into an expressionistic corner with this hyper-stylized thriller set aboard a German train in 1945. For all its visual razzle-dazzle, this tale of a trainee conductor contending with Nazi terrorists and a collaborationist boss is an oppressively claustrophobic ride. No wonder the lo-fi, wildness of the Dogme 95 revolution was just around the corner.
Before Sunrise (1995)
Richard Linklater’s Before movies span 20 years but it all began unassumingly enough onboard a train from Budapest. Jesse (Ethan Hawke) strikes up a conversation with Céline (Julie Delpy), then persuades her to disembark with him in Vienna to while away the evening and early morning before he catches his flight home to the U.S. Had she not fallen for his charms, audiences would have been deprived of one of films most enchanting trilogies.
Runaway Train (1985)
Jon Voight and Eric Roberts were both Oscar-nominated for playing hard-bitten convicts who steal a locomotive after a prison escape. Directed with an air of existential horror by Andrei Konchalovsky, Runaway Train — based on a 1966 screenplay co-written by Akira Kurosawa — emerged as a first rate genre film, and a hard-boiled action thriller that feels a bit like Speed on a train.
Snowpiercer (2013)
Revolution is in the air in Bong Joon-ho’s post-apocalyptic thriller set on a train that endlessly circles a frozen and inhospitable Earth, carrying the last survivors of humanity — poor folk crammed into squalor at the back, rich ones whooping it up in first class with their own nightclub in front. There was enough fuel in the furnace to keep the idea burning through a Netflix series.
Strangers on a Train (1951)
The murderous “crisscross” trade-off proposed by Robert Walker to Farley Granger in Strangers on a Train may be hatched on a train but it’s telling that the actual climax occurs on an out-of-control carousel — the antithesis of the train, and anathema to any screenwriter, since all it does is go pointlessly round and round.
The General (1926)
Cinema has been coupled to train travel ever since the Lumière brothers screened their 45-second film from 1895 of a train arriving at La Ciotat station. Incredible to think that it was only 30 years later that Buster Keaton set to work on his staggeringly sophisticated silent Civil War action comedy, the story about a doleful train engineer who goes all out to save two objects of his affection — his engine and his sweetheart (Marion Mack).
https://youtu.be/4nj0vEO4Q6s
The Lumière brothers had it right — there is something undeniably cinematic about the locomotive. When it comes to train travel, you never know who might be onboard, and therein lies both its mystery and its thrill.