Wednesday 8 July 2015

Movie: 'Silver Streak' (1976)

It's difficult to write anything sensible about 'Silver Streak', as it is a primarily nonsensical film. Made during the mid-1970s it sits akwardly between two eras, wavering between comedic thriller, 'James Bond' tropes, crime caper, art fraud, gun violence, innuendo, the train motifs of 'The Lady Vanishes', and its eventual destiny as a runaway train movie. All this, and we see the emergence of the second draft version of Gene Wilder, the unlikely cinematic love god, and his comedy partnership with Richard Pryor, all set against some sumptuous Henry Mancini music. Does that pique your interest?

No claims can be made for impartiality with respect to 'Silver Streak', as it is one of my earliest movie memories. It does mark the end of Gene Wilder's moments of peak insanity, so clearly the high points of 'The Producers', 'Young Frankenstein', 'Willy Wonka' and 'Blazing Saddles', and his slide into comparative normality. Apart from that sad point, the movie is a fun romp, the likes of which were rare in number even at the time. It's also a clear relation to 'Foul Play', which is another fascinating oddity of the comedic thriller fuzzy subset of films and shares a lot of the creative power houses at its core.

The film revolves around the chance romantic encounter between Gene Wilder's George Caldwell and Jill Clayburgh's Hilly Burns, his apparent witnessing of her boss's murder off the side of the eponymous train as they journey to Chicago, the surrounding intrigue, his being ejected from the train and rejoining three (!) separate times, and the eventual showdown between his teamup with Richard Pryor's criminal Grover Muldoon and the big bad villain Patrick McGoohan as Roger Devereau. That's a lot of names to remember, but it's also a classical list of roguish eccentric actors. Patrick McGoohan alone sends the oddness factor through the roof, as he did in every thing in which he appeared. The legacy of 'The Prisoner' never left McGoohan, no matter how he tried. He was always an odd, odd presence. go look at his 1970s episodes of 'Columbo' if you doubt this self-evident fact!

'Silver Streak' is good, no matter how it might read as a mess from what I've written already. It's cast is glorious, featuring Ned Beatty, Ray Walston, Richard Kiel and Clifton James in small parts, and Mancini's music is hypnotically locomotive in places. Henry Mancini seems to have become an overlooked composer now, a man who never existed, but he did make some marvelous scores. It wasn't all 'Pink Panther' movies and 'Peter Gunn'. The wobbling between genres and movie types might get a little confusing but the film comes from a time when the medium wasn't quite so beholden to fitting into any one box and could be slightly more flexible and creative. The only real disappointment is in the ultimate collapse down to a fairly conventional finale and climax, that any old film could have accomplished. Such is the trap requirement that so many films fall into when trying to wrap up and conclude. 'Why wrap up at all?', I sometimes wonder. 'Why?'

Oh, and that's 'Jaws' from the 70s Bond films. Yes, the man did get around! See also: 'The Wild Wild West'.

O.

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