Planes, Trains, and Cinema

The day that trains ceased to be the most popular form of transportation was a sad day for cinema. For decades they had been the stars of countless thrillers and screwball comedies, exploited for their twisting narrow claustrophobia, the privacy of their first-class berths, and the serendipity of public dining cars where you could be seated at a table with anyone (or someone very specific if you bribed the steward). Trains allowed for a cross-section of the population to be in close proximity for a short while and then go their separate ways. Tennis stars and oedipally stunted dandies, men on the run and cool worldly blondes, heiresses and impoverished musicians, notorious vamps and missionary priests, cross-dressing fugitives and sex-kittenish ukulele-players, shy wallflowers and impecunious charmers, millionaires and entire “Ale and Quail” clubs--fate brings all these together for a time to forward the plots of their various cinematic journeys. In fact there seems to be no other form of transportation more suited to film. Cars provide room for only a few passengers and buses are at once too communal and too confined to offer the same variety of plots that a train can. Which isn’t to say that buses and cars don’t have their place in movies (the road movie is a whole genre in itself), but simply that they don’t touch on the breadth of possibilities that trains offered in their hey-day.

Trains have played a vital role in film history from its very start. Arguably the first horror film and the first western featured trains. The “horror” film is a little actuality by the Lumière brothers in 1895 of a train arriving head on into a station, which according to the advertising sent the audience fleeing for the exits in fear for their lives. The western is The Great Train Robbery from 1903, one of the most effective early film narratives. The comedic value of locomotion, however, was most thoroughly explored for the first time in the 1920s by Buster Keaton. He gave us two of the most delightful train journeys in silent film history, Our Hospitality (1923) and The General (1927). Both films are comedies of Southern manners, and Our Hospitality begins the long and very fruitful tradition of a fateful romantic entanglement beginning in a shared train compartment. This would continue in screwball comedies and thrillers throughout ‘30s, ‘40s, and ‘50s. By the ‘60s most trains came equipped with a mysteriously obliging blonde who would unquestioningly aid our desperate heroes in their hour of need.

The great writer/director of the early 1940s, Preston Sturges, understood well the comedic value of the atmosphere of those close quarters, from the awkward athletics involved in jumping on and off the freight cars of Sullivan’s Travels, to the awkward athletics (and sensuous possibilities) of a stranger climbing in and out of an upper berth in Palm Beach Story, to even more awkward revelations which can occur in the privacy first class sleeping compartment of a honeymooning couple in The Lady Eve. Still the unimpeachable master of both locomotive comedy and suspense is Alfred Hitchcock, and The Lady Vanishes from 1938 is the quintessential train movie, encapsulating all the romantic, comedic, and thrilling possibilities which train travel lends itself to. Iris Henderson is a young English woman traveling in a central European alpine nation as the world teeters on the brink of war, more importantly she teeters on the brink of marriage to a “blue-blooded cheque-chaser,” and a teetering flowerpot meant for rather whimsical old governess thrusts her into the midst of an international situation. Stuck on a train with a slight concussion Iris is forced to rely on her fellow passengers, the majority of whom wish to convince her that she is hallucinating. It is Hitchcock at his most sparkling, and its locomotive setting shows the director in his element. He was fascinated by the way people were thrown together through train travel. The Lady Vanishes, The 39 Steps, North By Northwest, and Suspicion all deal with the romantic possibilities in meeting strangers on trains. Strangers on a Train though, plays with the opposite possibility--sharing a train compartment with a psychopath.

Today most people travel by airplane rather than trains, and though they are used for pretty much the same purpose, an airplane is far more limiting cinematically than a train. Their cabins are too big for privacy, and the various nooks and crannies are too small to provide good cover. There is no place to hide on a normal airplane, so directors often create huge multi-layer luxury-liners of jets, which so little resemble the planes that us plebs fly on that it is hard for audiences to connect them with their own experiences. The Jodie Foster film Flightplan exemplifies this problem. The pitch might intrigue--“The Lady Vanishes, but on a plane”--but in order to allow a vanishing to occur the director destroys any claustrophobia that might be invoked by making the plane itself is so huge that it seems like a flying office building. The familiarity that the movie tries to breed by being set in a space that the majority of its audience have been at one time or another is negated as Jodie Foster’s character descends into the bowels of this beast whose vastness is belied by the confines of its fuselage.

None of this is to say that it isn’t possible to make a good movie set on an airplane. Only a month before the release of Flightplan Wes Craven’s admirably tense airline thriller Red Eye came out. This film exploited rather than fought the fact that there is no place to hide on a plane, and used to great effect the terror familiar to every traveler of having a seatmate from hell. An absolutely top-notch B movie (complete with a ludicrous final act) it doesn’t try to take the elements of a train thriller and simply set them on a plane, but finds a way to work with its environment rather than struggle against it. Hitchcock would have been proud.

We've come from "His Girl Friday" to "How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days"

One of the most pernicious fantasies in which modern filmgoes, critics, and theorist persist is the “look how far we’ve come” mentality. While I cannot deny that Hollywood’s portrayal of ethnic minorities has improved over the course of the century (though apparently Eddie Murphy can still play an owner of a Chinese restaurant with the same stereotyped ticks which Mickey Rooney affected in “Breakfast at Tiffany’s”), when this mentality is applied to the portrayal of women it hits a serious snag. So by all means let us discuss how far we’ve come.

I have just completed watching Louis Feuillade’s eight-hour silent crime opus, “Les Vampires.” The chief criminal mastermind of the serial, shown throughout 1915 and 1916, was Irma Vep, whose cunning plots stayed always an inch (and often times miles) ahead of our intrepid, and rather boring, hero the newspaper reporter Philippe Guérande. Irma Vep, played by Musidora, is the right-hand woman to the Grand Vampire, the nominal head of the gang, but while Grand Vampires come and go (there are three of them), Irma Vep is forever. She wriggles in and out of each episode clad in black cat-suits and voluminous fur coats, captivating, immoral, and sharply intelligent. She is far more intriguing than say the “villainess” of a recent week’s number one movie who, like so many, doesn’t even have the decency to be human. A female villain today can be omnipotent only so long as she is safely circuits and switches not flesh and blood. “Les Vampires” perhaps is not a revolutionary feminist statement, but it was made five years before women could even vote in the US, and thirty years before that became a possibility in its native France. The advances made in the subsequent generations aren’t necessarily reflected on celluloid. By the time the final episode of “Les Vampires” was shown Musidora was a star, and she went on to write, direct, produce, and act in several features of her own.

Still Irma Vep was a villain and as such was not held to the same standards as the cinematic “good girls” of the same era. People like to make the point that the liberated woman was demonized in these early days of cinema and was always punished for her disregard for social norms. But then where does this place the “serial queens” of the early silent era. “The Hazards of Helen” was a long-running American serial which began a few years before “Les Vampires” reached screens. It’s heroine, Helen, repeatedly had to prove herself in a male dominated world, and her job as a railroad telegraph operator gave her plenty of opportunities to. She is intelligent, athletic and resourceful, and though she is rescued by a handsome hero from time to time (there were over a hundred episodes, they had to change up the formula occasionally), the vast majority of the episodes had her leaping from moving vehicles, or racing a motorcycle over a rising drawbridge. These days, as Arnold Schwarzenegger once said, women just get in the way of the action, they’re rarely asked to participate in it. The last act of an action movie has become the province of the hero, and no matter how active the heroine she is sidelined for the dénouement not wanting threaten the masculinity of the Adonis who will win her in the end. We like to think that it has always been that way, and that these days with action heroines like The Bride, Trinity, and Fox (“Kill Bill”, “The Matrix”, and “Wanted” for the uninitiated) things are getting better for our amazons, but back in 1934 when Hitchcock made his first version of “The Man Who Knew Too Much” it is Leslie Banks, the hero of the piece, who is taken out of commission in the final act, and Edna Best is the only one capable of saving her husband and daughter.

Hitchcock’s heroines, especially his early ones, have a resourcefulness and intelligence that you don’t often find in movies today. While James Stewart is confined to a wheelchair in “Rear Window” it is left to Grace Kelly to be the active half the relationship, climbing fire escapes and shadowing the villain. In “Shadow of a Doubt” it’s Theresa Wright’s young Charlie who has the brains to see her charming uncle for what he really is, and the heroine of “Notorious” goes into the lion’s den to spy, unlike the heroine of “Notorious Redux” AKA “Mission Impossible II” where the heroine goes into the lions den so that the men can spy using a microphone implanted on her body. In fact these days the importance of a female character lands more and more on her body. Hollywood seems to be reluctant to have a female lead, and only seems to give in when it is obvious that it is absolutely necessary for the character to be female… namely she needs to get pregnant at some point in the film (they tried once still keeping the character male, but Schwarzenegger’s “Junior” left a little to be desired). People accuse Hayes Code many times as being a measure used to keep women in their place, but I actually think it did more for women than people realize. It allowed them to be more than bodies, since their bodies became taboo it was their minds that made them desirable. Sure, Claudette Colbert’s legs are praised, but watching her in “Palm Beach Story” or “It Happened One Night” it’s her wit that makes her sexy. In Hayes Code era women often were able to seduce their men through dialogue, rather than anatomy, and far from silencing women it was a time when women’s voices were heard most strongly both on screen, and on the page. Perhaps later I’ll go into the female screenwriters in Hollywood during the 30s and 40s, but that's a whole other article in itself.

"On TV, “Sex and the City” was never as insulting as “Desperate Housewives,” which strikes me as catastrophically retrograde, but, almost sixty years after “All About Eve,” which also featured four major female roles, there is a deep sadness in the sight of Carrie and friends defining themselves not as Bette Davis, Anne Baxter, Celeste Holm, and Thelma Ritter did—by their talents, their hats, and the swordplay of their wits—but purely by their ability to snare and keep a man. Believe me, ladies, we’re not worth it.” – Anthony Lane

The Actor Vanishes

Throughout film history, there have been any number of great actors who, for better or worse, are now forgotten or worse yet, ignored. Actors like Leslie Howard, now better known as the guy who played Ashley Wilkes in Gone with the Wind than for his better, more interesting roles in Pygmalion, The Scarlet Pimpernel, and 49th Parallel, who were not only popular in their time, but quite powerful as well. I don't know what it is that makes us forget men like Howard but remember Olivier, except that Sir Larry had the good fortune to live a long and full life and Howard died tragically at the age of 42. But today, in this post, I am not concerned with Howard, but with another man, very much like him, who is too little regarded as a film actor.

That man is Michael Redgrave.

If you know Michael Redgrave at all, you probably know him from one of several sources: as the father of Vanessa, Lynn and Corin Redgrave and the grandfather of Natasha Richardson; as the third in the trifecta of great British stage actors, alongside Olivier, Gielgud and, at times, Ralph Richardson; or perhaps, if you really like Hitchcock, you may know him as the romantic lead of 'The Lady Vanishes'. In any event, Redgrave is certainly less of a footnote than Leslie Howard, but here is the crux of the matter: how many films have you actually seen him in? Supposing that you have seen The Lady Vanishes, oh Hitchcockian, have you seen any others? The Browning Version, The Captive Heart, Oh! What a Lovely War!, Mourning Becomes Electra, The Dam Busters, Secret Beyond the Door, The Stars Look Down, Kipps, The Quiet American, Dead of Night?

He worked, in his day, with some of the greatest actors and directors: Alfred Hitchcock, Carol Reed, Anthony Asquith. His first film role was as a captain in Hitchcock's 'Secret Agent', which also boasted a cast including Peter Lorre, Madeleine Carroll, Robert Young, and...John Gielgud. He was first and foremost a stage actor, which may account for the lack of films available on DVD, in the US at least. But he was a film actor too, and a damn fine one at that.

Perhaps Redgrave's brilliance lies in the fact that he, initially at least, was not comfortable on film. He did The Lady Vanishes because he 'had a family to support'; he was uncomfortable with the notion that he did not have time to prepare the same as he did on stage. And, in the end, he was dissatisfied with his performance. But turn again to 'The Lady Vanishes' and actually watch the man. He certainly does not look uncomfortable. He looks relaxed and speaks his lines as nonchalantly as his character demands. It is not merely because of Hitchcock's masterful direction that The Lady Vanishes is often ranked as the Master's best British film, and often comes up on Top Ten lists. Redgrave certainly has a better time of it than his friend John Gielgud (thought I adore Secret Agent), who at times looks like he's lost the will to act.

Redgrave in 'The Lady Vanishes' has no such problem. Consider for a moment the introduction of his character Gilbert:

Redgrave's performance is here vital to an understanding of the film, and indeed to its outlook on love. We have just seen Iris discussing, in rather depressing terms, her prospective marriage to what one of her friends describes as a 'blue-blooded check chaser'. When we are given our one and only glimpse of Charles, we are struck both by his similarity to Redgrave, but also the very important differences. That Gilbert is better looking is just the surface; his vitality, classlessness, and association with music and dance puts him in stark contrast to the impression we first receive of Charles, and the physical appearance of the man himself. Far from being the check chaser feared by Iris and her friends, Gilbert is the personification of joy. He dances, he plays the clarinet, he even sings! And he is cheeky enough to walk right into a woman's room and propose that they literally sleep together. Part of the breezy, charming, romantic nature of the film rests securely on Redgrave's shoulders; without Gilbert, his clarinet, and his carefree nature, Miss Froy is never found, the villains win the day, and Iris falls into a loveless marriage. But that would never do.



Redgrave had a tendency to vanish into his roles; very seldom are we aware of the actor himself. Comparing his performance in 'The Lady Vanishes' to his later portrayal of Orin in 'Mourning Becomes Electra' to his staid, understated performance as Crocker-Harris in 'The Browning Version' brings up the great breadth of his ability. A classically trained actor, he nonetheless often embodies qualities we associate with the Method men of the 1950s and later. He vanishes. Vanishes into the character, into the setting. Vanishes not just behind grayed hair or spectacles, flashy white clothes or a loose bow-tie, but vanishes into himself. For all intents and purposes, Redgrave's great quality was in never being Michael Redgrave. Olivier, great actor though he was, could never really say that.