Thursday Movie Picks - Train Movies

Written as part of the weekly blogathon hosted by Wandering Through the Shelves. Please join us by picking three movies that fit the week's theme and telling people about them!

Ever since the dawn of film, with the Lumière brothers' "L'arrivée d'un train en gare de La Ciotat" in 1896, the cinema has been in love with trains. It's hard to deny they make for pretty arresting viewing on their own, not really needing anything else to give them interest. As someone who commuted via train from Connecticut to New York City for work for seven years, I can say that the trains of today are not quite what they were: The modern sleekness has stripped away a lot of their grandeur. At any rate, these films inspired by trains are pretty great, and capture a lot (if not all) of what makes them so fascinating.

The General (Clyde Bruckman and Buster Keaton, 1926) Buster Keaton is a genius. A goddamn genius. The physical stunts he did are pure madness to even attempt, but he executes them with such flawless ease that it makes me jealous. And to top it all off, "The Great Stone-Face" has no flair whatsoever. He just tosses off every single death-defying stunt like it's nothing. Like he's bored. Oh, a house just fell down around me. Whatever. Oh, I just narrowly avoided getting shot by a canon which I loaded after running along a moving train, that's all. No big whoop, just another day on the job, wasn't even any fun. It's sick. The General, perhaps his finest hour, he gets the girl by rescuing both her and his beloved train in the midst of the Civil War. Shockingly, it's actually (slightly loosely) based on a true story.

The Lady Vanishes (Alfred Hitchcock, 1938) Hitchcock's British pictures are quite different from his American ones, and I don't think that difference is more apparent than in this film. It's a sly little thriller, yes, but it's also a light comedy, something that, while an element of some of Hitchcock's later pictures, could never really be called a defining trait of any of them. That it works so breezily well is due in part to Hitch, but mostly to his fine, fine cast: Margaret Lockwood as our heroine, Michael Redgrave as her impossibly dashing foil, and of course Dame May Whitty as the titular old lady who may or may not have even existed in the first place. And let's not forget the delightful Basil Radford and Naunton Wayne as Charters & Caldicott, such perfectly British supporting characters that they were drafted to appear in two other completely different films (one of which, Night Train to Munich, not only also takes place on a train, but also co-stars Margaret Lockwood) and had a mini-series all to themselves. The Lady Vanishes is pure pleasure.

20th Century (Howard Hawks, 1934) Okay, yes, this is really only here because I've performed in the musical based on this film and it's so, so bad. But the film is fun. I mean, I ask you: Can you go wrong with a Howard Hawks-directed screwball comedy starring Carole Lombard and John Barrymore as sparring, egotistical theater folk? You cannot, my friends. You truly can NOT.