Of course I’ve seen this movie before. It’s one of those they put on every Xmas. But you can really see why. It’s a lovely film. Schmaltzy? Hell, yes!
The moment the odd couple first meet.
Steve Martin is city slicker ad exec Neal Page, who winds up sharing an adventurous road trip with larger than life curtain-ring salesman Del Griffith, played by John Candy. Director John Hughes is very good at this sort of thing. And Martin and Candy are perfect in their roles.
Travelling by bus…
Themes that it touches upon are friendship, family, and coping with adversity. What relation it has to any form of reality, who knows? But it’s a pitch-perfect Holiday Season movie, a Hollywood dream-machine confection par excellence.
What a strange film! Strange, that is, by modern standards, rather than those of the day. Filmed in ‘glorious Technicolor’ – it was the first Ealing comedy filmed in the new format – it’s a picture postcard fantasy of a certain time in and idea of England.
In essence it’s a comedy about the beginnings of ‘heritage’ railways; as The State withdrew from steam locomotion, the public stepped in. Apparently it’s even based on a real Welsh example, which was allegedly the very first such heritage line. It’s noteworthy that this is a whole decade before the infamous Beeching axe would fall.
Stanley Holloway as Walter Valentine.
Visually it’s beautiful, a celluloid time-capsule. And it’s also quite sweet in how it portrays the era. There’s a just-post-WWII ‘Blitz spirit’, as when the passengers of the train all pitch in to get water, after the dastardly bus crew get Harry Hawkins (Sid James) to sabotage the water supply.
There are some thumping great ironies in there, as well; witness, for example, when there’s a joke about how, if the railway makes too much profit, it’ll be nationalised!
Modern history has demonstrated, over and over again, particularly under Toryism, that losses are usually nationalised (i.e. passed on to the public purse), whilst profit is privatised.
The Vicar and the drunk, crewing the train.
There are also all sorts of moments – for example at the public meeting, when Squire Chesterford (John Gregson) makes the case for the railway (as opposed to bus/road developments), on the basis of how it’ll change the nature of Titfield – that reflect what was considered, at the time, to make for a ‘good old fashioned’ British Utopia.
In this instance that revolves around the fear, also present in George Orwell’s very different 1984 (‘I am a name, not a number’!) that old country lanes will be tarmac’ed, and houses be numbered, rather than named.
Of course the quaint old trains were themselves, at one time, the harbingers of a modern industrialised doom. But now they are – and evidently even back in ‘53 they were – the stuff of ‘olde England’! There are many other little interesting insights into certain visions of how life was then (the squire and the poacher!), what constituted progress, and what makes for the ideal life.
Lovely old Bedford bus.
One of the things I like most about this film is the saturated slightly gaudy colour, AKA Technicolor. It’s very like the intense colouring of some design and illustration of that era. And so many things, from the clothes, to furniture, cars, trucks, etc, are, or rather were, so much more aesthetically pleasing than the vast bulk of modern mass-produced tat we are surrounded by now.
For example, the old Bedford bus, of the villainous rivals of the loco’ lovers, Pearce & Crump, is gorgeous. I absolutely adore the upholstery fabric inside the bus:
Dig that old fabric!
It has to be admitted I was only half watching this delightful old film, whilst Teresa and I played our Sunday afternoon Scrabble game, in between World Cup match viewing. I, or we, really ought to watch it again and give it my/our full attention.
It seems to me a good solid old-fashioned dose of ‘50s period fun. Balcon-era Ealing film at its cosily British best. I’d definitely recommend it.
Despite the rather ludicrous liberties taken with the real historical Custer, and a few set pieces that seem a bit odd and gratuitous – Sgt. Buckley’s lengthy but ultimately pointless log-flume escape for example – there’s enough here to enjoy.
Robert Shaw has sufficient charisma to play the part, even if it’s a part as muddled as the movie itself. Show’s Custer, a humourless puritanical martinet, who’s dedication to military duty makes his Washington episode rather odd, esp’ when contrasted with his later career fighting the ‘Injuns’.
The production is pretty epic, with large numbers of extras and the landscapes (Spain, or so I’ve read!) playing their parts in evoking the grand spectacles of the ol’ West. Such scenes as the attack on the gold-miners train, featuring a model of a high wooden rail bridge, are valiantly done, but, from a modern post CGI perspective can occasionally look rather clunky.
Numerous actors – Robert Ryan as the doomed Sgt. Mulligan, Ty Hardin, Jeffrey Hunter and Lawrence Tierney as Reno, Bentine and Sheridan (all suitably manly, but otherwise rather one-dimensional) – acquit themselves reasonably enough. But Custer’s wife, played by Mary Ure, and his Nemesis, Kieron Moore in ‘red-face’ as Chief Dull Knife, lack presence.
The film also tries to bighorn (titter!), er… sorry, shoe-horn numerous disparate threads into one overall narrative, with mixed success. These range from facing up to the guilt of American crimes against the indigenous ’Indians’, to the changing culture of that era, from the theatre (where Custer sees himself depicted) to armoured railroads, harbingers of a machine age which threatens Custer’s ideas of equine war with honour!
But nonetheless, for all this, I have dim recollections of the powerful impact portions of this movie had on me as a kid. An even now there are moments when it is either moving, exciting, or both. And some of the various sundry sub-plots alluded to above are also actually interesting.
Still, all told, and despite the occasional flashes of interest or excitement, it’s a bit of a muddled mess. Not quite a massacre, perhaps. But confused, disjointed, and fluctuating wildly, even in its entertainment value. A long way off being a classic. But still worth watching.
