Top 10 Train Movies

Strangers on a Train

In the days before iPods, texting, Kindles and Nooks, people actually talked to each other on public transportation. The loss of this innocent small talk is generally looked at as a bad thing, but there's at least one plus to our modern way of doing things: the risk of accidentally implying to your neighbor that you will kill his father if he murders your wife is much smaller now. That's the setup for 1951 film Strangers on a Train, one of Alfred Hitchcock's most devilish thrillers. After this opening sequence, the film is distressingly train-free, but Hitch makes up for it by doubling up on the transportation thrills, staging the film's climactic confrontation on a runaway carousel.

The Great Train Robbery

Edwin S. Porter's landmark 1903 silent film The Great Train Robbery told a story like no motion picture had before, and it took as its subject bandits from the Wild West. They're not on the train the whole time: other scenes include a shoot-out amid a copse of trees and a dance hall. And, of course, there's the famous shot of a gunman firing his weapon directly at audience members, who didn't know what hit them. The revolutionary movie was a monumental success.

Silver Streak

In the 1976 film Silver Streak, book publisher George Caldwell (Gene Wilder) decides to take a train from Los Angeles to Chicago because he "just wants to be bored." But instead he has the least boring train ride ever. He witnesses a murder, gets thrown off the train by one of the killers, gets back on the train, gets knocked off the train again, is accused of murder, steals a patrol car, meets a small-time thief (Richard Pryor), disguises himself as a flamboyant black man, gets back on the train, has a shoot-out, jumps off the train, gets arrested again, clears his name, jumps back on the train and saves all the passengers from death in the now runaway train. Whew! Oh, and he gets the girl too. Here's betting that next time he takes a plane.

The Taking of Pelham One Two Three

It's 1:23 p.m. and a crowded subway train has just left Pelham Station in the Bronx for Manhattan. At 1:45 p.m. four desperate, heavily armed men seize control of the train. The City of New York is given one hour to come up with the $1 million ransom. 1974's The Taking of Pelham One Two Three stars the ever cynical curmudgeon Walter Matthau as a New York City Transit Authority policeman who must try to save 17 hostages (and the ransom) from the clutches of the clever crooks. Some notable moments: the ever jaded New Yorkers laugh when one of the armed men says they must all stay seated or they will be shot; the line "You're outta your skull" (in reference to the $1 million ransom demand); and the fact that subway fare was only a measly 35 cents (it's now $2.25). Quentin Tarantino borrowed the thieves' use of color names (Mr. Brown, etc.) for his breakout film Reservoir Dogs. A 2009 remake, The Taking of Pelham 1 2 3, starred Denzel Washington, who also happens to star in Unstoppable.

Murder on the Orient Express

Like all great fictional detectives, Belgian (don't you dare call him French) sleuth Hercule Poirot has a tendency to be in the right place at the right time. In Murder on the Orient Express, as one may surmise from the title, it's on board the lavish transcontinental train. Sidney Lumet directed the 1974 film adaptation of Agatha Christie's classic from the 1930s, in which a wealthy American is murdered and there's no shortage of suspects from various nationalities and social classes. Among the characters are a Russian princess, an English colonel and a Swedish missionary, while the luminous cast included everyone from Lauren Bacall and Sean Connery to John Gielgud and Ingrid Bergman, who won an Oscar for her role.

The Darjeeling Limited

There's no shortage of movies (or books) that set tormented, navel-gazing Westerners against alien, usually somewhat exotic landscapes and allow said protagonists to grope around for some vague and often hackneyed sense of meaning in their lives. On one level Wes Anderson's The Darjeeling Limited is a parody of that trope, but on another it's just a very long Louis Vuitton ad. Heavily stylized and, like most Anderson films, fairly cute, it was filmed in the Indian desert state of Rajasthan — a state that is not only the most overly trafficked tourist destination in the country, but also almost on the exact opposite end of India from Darjeeling, the purported destination of the film's protagonists' purported journey. The train itself has the look of any of India's rumbling, overcrowded long-haul sleepers, except its interior at times feels conspicuously like a Brooklyn apartment. Fittingly, despite the fact that it's on a set of rails, the train ends up getting lost.

The Lady Vanishes

Before the hit American period, before Rear Window and Psycho and Strangers on a Train and North by Northwest, Alfred Hitchcock was the master of the minor British suspense thriller. Two years before heading to the States to direct Rebecca, which won the Oscar for Best Picture (though Hitchcock himself would never win one for best director), he directed The Lady Vanishes, a 1938 film that takes place almost entirely on a train traveling through a fictional central European nation. A young lady makes the acquaintance of an older woman, who mysteriously disappears from the train midtrip. A witty mystery full of many trademarks we now recognize as classic Hitchcock (the MacGuffin, espionage, playful camerawork — witness a poisoned-glass scene in which 10-inch glasses are filmed from a low angle to make them appear huge), it was named the best film of 1938 by the New York Times.

Runaway Train

They're going off the rails on a crazy train (and other metaphors) in this 1985 film that stars Jon Voight and Eric Roberts as a pair of convicts who escape an Alaska prison and hop aboard a locomotive. Of course, they get trapped on the one train that somehow doesn't have an engineer. The out-of-control locomotive goes hurtling through the Alaskan tundra as those on board attempt to put on the brakes. Meanwhile, the two cons, along with a female love interest (the only railway worker left on the train), are being pursued by the prison's administrator. This all leads to an inevitable battle in the engine room between the movie's heroic prisoner on the run and the vindictive prison official. Guess who wins! Despite its action-cliché premise, the film's two actors both received Academy Award nominations.

Train of Life

This 1998 pan-European production, known most widely by its French appellation, Train de Vie, starred at the 1999 Sundance Film Festival, but was seen by precious few American moviegoers. Critically acclaimed through much of Europe (the trailer above is from Italy), Train of Life is a tragicomic tale about a village of Jews escaping the Holocaust by building their own deportation train. Some in the group masquerade as Nazis, while others act as detainees on the way to concentration camps (their real destination is Palestine). The film's darkly antic humor comes from its Romanian director, Radu Mihaileanu, who fled to France as a student to escape his home country's communist dictatorship. Passages of the movie are deeply satirical — at one point, the train's passengers splinter off into myriad political factions — while others are uproarious and mad. Who wouldn't want to watch a nighttime dance-off between the runaway Jews and another band of runaway Gypsies? Ultimately, though, it's hard to forget that this is a film about the Holocaust. And its main character, the Jewish group's village idiot, is a Shakespearean fool of the highest order, capturing both the absurdity of this farce and the very real horror underlying it all.

Throw Momma from the Train

In this dark 1987 comedy, Larry Donner (Billy Crystal) and Owen Lift (Danny DeVito) make a deathly pact: You kill my wife, I'll kill your momma. The momma in question is Margaret Lift, a terrifyingly brash, hoarse-throated old biddy who makes Owen's life a complete nightmare. The plot for the double murder comes to Owen while watching the old Alfred Hitchcock movie Strangers on a Train (also on this list), in which the two lead characters plan their own gruesome misdeeds. Larry attempts a number of comical murder attempts, including pillow suffocation and a push down a staircase. But the plot's climax occurs on the aforementioned train, where Larry and Owen unexpectedly save momma's life