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Star Tribune (02/Dec/1993) - Hollywood on track: AMC explores use of trains in movies

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Hollywood on track: AMC explores use of trains in movies

"All Aboard! Riding the Rails of American Film" — Today at 8 p.m. and midnight on American Movie Classics

American Movie Classics is an oldies channel, but the people who program it have had one good new idea: specials that examine how particular subjects have been treated in the movies.

So far, AMC has looked at movies about baseball ("Diamonds of the Silver Screen"), boxing ("Knockout!") and World War II ("Stars and Stripes"). "Street Scenes," a retrospective of New York City as portrayed by Hollywood, won a CableACE award.

"All Aboard!" is AMC's best clip-fest yet, partly because so many big names participated, partly because trains figure into so many great American movies.

As narrator Jason Robards reminds viewers, trains were integral to movies because they were integral to life. Until the early 1950s, almost all traveling of any distance in the United States was done by rail.

Like movies, trains also can be the stuff of dreams. Fannie Flagg, whose novel "Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Cafe" became a big hit movie, recalls that her grandmother's house in Alabama was so close to the tracks that you could touch the passing trains with a fishing pole.

"I remember sitting on the front porch with my grandmother watching the trains go by," she says. "And we would make up stories about where they were going and what they were going to do. And I think that when there was no entertainment, the trains offered great entertainment, because they were the only thing that was moving in the town."

As charming as the anecdotes about trains can be, the heart of "All Aboard!" is a collection of clips that may make you want to run off to the nearest video store and rent a stack of classics.

The movies chosen span almost 90 years, from the 1903 silent "The Great Train Robbery" to Robert Zemeckis' "Back to the Future, Part III" from 1990. Producer-writer Jana DeHart and producer-editor Marcia Ely show us that trains were important to movies as diverse as "Casablanca," the musical "The Harvey Girls" and the coming-of-age drama "Stand by Me."

No director used trains in movies more often or better than Alfred Hitchcock. He isn't around to talk, but some of the stars of his masterpieces are: Teresa Wright annotates scenes from "Shadow of a Doubt," Farley Granger from "Strangers on a Train," and Eva Marie Saint from "North by Northwest."

Other highlights:

  • Novelist-turned-director Michael Crichton remembering how his hair caught fire while shooting a car-jumping sequence in 1979's "The Great Train Robbery," and how star Sean Connery nearly fell to his death doing his own stunt.
  • Director John Frankenheimer showing and telling how he shot the astonishing close-ups of the wreck at the end of his 1964 movie "The Train."
  • Gene Wilder recalling the filming of the train-station crash at the end of his 1976 comedy with Richard Pryor, "Silver Streak."

"All Aboard!" also includes theories about the symbolism of trains, some of which may make you think, some of which may make you snicker. But Laurence Kardish, film curator of the Museum of Modern Art in New York City, is surely on to something when he says trains and movies share a special relationship: "No matter what else the train stands for, it always conveys the notions of junction and journey: a starting point, a voyage, a terminus — elements as ineluctable as a film's beginning, middle and end."

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