Since The Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat in 1897, trains have been an integral part of cinema. The release of that film, directed by the Lumière brothers, brought this revolutionary medium for storytelling into the public eye, birthing the popular myth that mind-blown audiences ducked and fled for cover as the train barrelled towards the camera. 130 years later, trains are still one of the most energising locations for cinema. A car is cramped spatially, limiting the visual potential within the vehicle. A boat is harder to film on and the water is too broad and open to weaponise suspense. A plane is similarly bland on the interior, and a bit heftier on the budget. But the train endures because of its singular route that it goes on, its speed, the ability to relax in beautifully designed carriages, and, of course, the flexibility to get on top of the train, on its side, heck, even underneath it. There’s also the anticipation of who might be waiting at the next station (if it’s Russ Cargill from the EPA – no need to duck).
In honour of Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part I’s staggering finale aboard the Orient Express (which weaved different carriages into a vertical obstacle course for our heroes), I decided to look back at a bunch of great train sequences from different eras and styles of movie-making. Sadly, Harry and Ron’s chocolate feast and James Bond’s many fight scenes do not feature, but are honourable mentions.
The General (1927)
It’s a fairly mainstream right choice, but that does not make it any less effective. Buster Keaton’s Civil War film packs the defining train set-piece for the silent era. Playing engineer Johnnie on the Confederate side, Keaton’s 75-minute ‘epic’ sees Johnnie’s beloved train The General stolen by Union spies. He rushes to get it back.
Long stretches of the film are shot on the tracks, but it’s the finale that is most memorable: a wide shot takes in a flowing river with a train bridge. We see mounted Union men ride down to the bank whilst behind them comes their train Texas, hurtling along the bridge only for the structure to collapse and the train to drop into the river, to be briefly used by Union solders as a footbridge before they are fended off. It’s an all-time stunt, with the shot keeping the soldiers in the picture to prove to us the train is real, and not a miniature. In a silent film filled with excitement and mad Keaton stunts, this train collapse was so loud its echoes were heard when making The Bridge on the River Kwai 30 years later.
Strangers on a Train (1951)
As the silent era derailed, a brand new locomotive pulled into Hollywood: sound. With it came the Golden Era, where train scenes were often found in Western pictures and the films of one Mr Alfred Hitchcock. The Master of Suspense is a bit of a trainspotter, with The 39 Steps, The Lady Vanishes and North by Northwest being particularly memorable. But, shockingly, it’s his film with the word ‘train’ in the title that is the best. Strangers on a Train has a deliciously evil opening: two, um, strangers, meet on a, um, train where one, Bruno, proposes that they each murder someone for the other. By doing so, they would never be caught as neither would have a motive – they are complete strangers. The receiver of this proposition, Guy, is a notable tennis player who Bruno identifies.
The scene begins with the awkward public interaction of touching feet under the carriage table: Bruno’s foot knocks Guy’s, but it is Guy who apologises. It swiftly moves to the next phase of lump-in-throat embarrassment, as Bruno sparks up conversation and moves across to sit next to Guy, deciphering his identity and planting homoerotic seeds in his little criminal allotment (Hitchcock slipped these past the censorship, but watch how much Guy stares at Bruno’s lips).
Hitchcock frames Bruno under the parting shadows of a Venetian blind, rendering his face a zebra of colliding morals as his fiendish plot is divulged. The camera is tight on Guy to create a feeling of entrapment; a binding of his fate with Bruno’s that pushes the hugely entertaining narrative along. In the background we hear the train chugging along soundly and Guy cannot simply walk off and away like he might try in a park. The train is the key to the film because it brings the two random characters together and fuses them onto one clear track that forms the rest of the story. Even after the scene has ended and we leave the train, Guy is still trapped on this criminal compartment. It’s a wonderful microcosm for the film. And also makes the pun ‘miscarriage of justice’ all the more fruitful.
The Train (1963)
It may boast the most bland title in cinematic existence until Gerard Butler’s Plane earlier this year, but this 60s war film contains astounding technical prowess in its execution as we bid farewell to the Golden Era and hello to the dawn of gritty location storytelling and farewell to the studio sound stages.
Directed by John Frankenheimer, The Train stars the reliable Burt Lancaster as a French Resistance fighter who attempts to stop the Germans from taking France’s most prized paintings back to Berlin via the railroad. Gripping in narrative and spellbinding in its ending, The Train has a number of sequences that could be addressed, including a race to a tunnel to avoid an aggressive Spitfire. But it is the interception set-piece that blows the mind; a sustained tour de force of practical effects as, having separated the painting-laden carriages from the engine, the Resistance send the train blitzing without its cargo into another stationary train at a nearby town.
The crash is visceral and weighty; the type of moment only achieved by legitimately sending that hulking mass of steel and coal thundering along at 60mph into another. Filmed in Europe, the film exemplifies the search for authenticity in the 1960s.
Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade (1989)
The New Wave Hollywood of the 1970s has a distinct decline in train-related scenes, especially ones worthy of discussion. The Western was in a slump and action films hadn’t fully kicked in. So, let’s steamroll into the commerciality of the 1980s.
In 1983’s admittedly dreadful Bond film Octopussy, 007 moves from carriage to carriage on a circus train, culminating in the world’s greatest spy disguising himself in a gorilla outfit (having just spent a while in clown make-up). Steven Spielberg, who would later cast a James Bond as the ‘father’ of Indiana Jones, clearly wanted to streamline that idea of a train having distinct ecosystems within each carriage, and better Octopussy. So, in the gleeful prologue to The Last Crusade, River Phoenix’s young Indy flees from treasure hunters on a circus train.
Each section was designed and filmed on an inflated set that could bump and vibrate as if it were on tracks. There is a carriage with an animatronic rhino, one with lions, one with snakes and one with magic crates. What is essential here is that each compartment is necessary to Indy’s character: the lion carriage gives him the Harrison Ford scar from a whip, the snakes activate his life-long fear, the magic suggests a slight inclination to believe in the mystical, and the rhino… teaches him to protect his manhood? It’s brash and goofy and funny, yet serves as the genesis of the Indiana Jones character going forwards.
The Wrong Trousers (1993)
Who said train scenes always have to be live-action? The visual consistency of a train track and the rigidity of its movement makes it a blessing for animators (I guess anyway, I don’t have a clue where to start). But a stop-motion train chase? That’s even harder. The folks at Aardman smashed it, and the sequence is here is an example of both animated train action and playing with scale; the characters are vastly bigger than the train.
30 years later and the short but airtight sequence remains a banner moment for animated action; the Pixar lot used it as a source of competition for Toy Story’s car chase. We have Gromit clinging all four limbs to the toy train, deflecting bullets with a saucepan helmet. We have Wallace gliding on one foot for an eternity around his seemingly gigantic house. We have a penguin, a highly dangerous criminal, satisfyingly imprisoned in a glass bottle. And we have a brilliant way to solve the ‘end of the line’ cliché: Gromit has to lay more track quick enough for the train to stay on it. Just an all round joy.
Unstoppable (2010)
Tony Scott loves things that move. The late director, brother of Ridley and the man behind Top Gun and True Romance, made such high velocity blockbusters he goes beyond regular cocaine filmmaking. In his CV of things that move quickly he nailed fighter jets, torpedoes, Tarantino dialogue and, in 2009 with The Taking of Pelham 123, trains. But he wasn’t quite done with locomotives, returning (for what would be his final film) with Unstoppable, in which Denzel Washington and Chris Pine spend the entire film chasing down a runaway train that is heading to a perilous bend on the track.
The joy of the film is that it’s effectively an accident. No villain is behind this. The runaway train is uncontrolled. Denzel and Pine chase it down because it’s their job. So, for a train scene that covers the entire film, Unstoppable is the one.
Scott’s intense editing and flashy style keeps the pace rampant, whilst Denzel (who suffers from acrophobia) reluctantly does his own stunts, with Pine, on top of the carriages, which were rattling more due to being empty. The engine of the runaway train was controlled by remote control like a Scaletrix, with many sequences being reliant on only one take being good enough. It’s one of the ultimate Film4 films due to how it grips you by the throat and refuses to let go.
The Lone Ranger (2013)
Building five miles of an oval-shaped railroad in the desert is just one of the massive undertakings the production team had when it came to making the biggest Western in Hollywood history. The Lone Ranger is famous for two unfortunate reasons: it was a colossal bomb it and stars Twitter legends Johnny Depp and Armie Hammer. The bad publicity sledgehammered the film’s shelf life, but I’ve always been entertained by its synthesis of Buster Keaton action with Pirates of the Caribbean madness. In particular, the exhilarating train chase finale stands up as a titan of big scale cinema.
Hammer, as the Lone Ranger, and Depp, as Tonto, engage the literal embodiments of capitalism aboard two trains, which begin one behind the other but soon split onto parallel tracks.
Gore Verbinski, the director, goes for broke. His trains are muscular beasts of groaning, animalistic machinery and coughing smoke. The grills are looming and sleek. The carriages sweat under the heated fossil fuels. They are, as the cliché goes, characters.
To film these two mechanical serpents racing through the mountains, the crew had to find a solution that didn’t involve laying track along unforgivable passes and steep ravines. So, they transformed a fleet of trucks into train carriages on wheels, and filmed the action practically on the trucks under the hot southern sun. Then, months later, under the hiss of air conditioning in a dark room, the visual effects team terraformed the road into an 1880s railroad, surgically removing the wheels of the trucks. The result is seamless, and my favourite train scene of the bunch.
Train to Busan (2016)
Next time you are boarding a train have a look around the carriage and ask yourself some questions. Who is on there with you? How old are they? What do they have with them? And, crucially, could you survive a zombie apocalypse with them? So begins the central pitch of our list entry from world cinema, South Korea’s ferocious thriller that may just be the ultimate zombie film.
South Korea’s biggest international hits generally have themes of class divide bathed in the scarlets of extreme violence, and Train to Busan definitely nails the latter. As a bullet train becomes infected with undying monsters, a father must rally his fellow passengers to survive a Darwinian Hellscape, as he seeks to get his estranged daughter from Seoul to Busan.
Featuring knock-out work from the mighty Ma Dong-seok (South Korea’s superior answer to The Rock), the fight scenes are confined and suspenseful. One set-piece at a train station is what ‘Hardhome’ was to Game of Thrones: an unstoppable wave of rapid undead throwing everything they can to pursue our heroes.
Th film plays with every part of a locomotive; from the toilets to the doors to the seats. But the ultimate takeaway of the film? Always check the above luggage rack is free.
For A Few Thoughts More 