From Silver to Gold

The train from LA to Chicago is the scene for murder, sex, and occasional slapstick in 1976's Silver Streak. Drawing some influence from Hitchcock, the film's an intelligently written suspense comedy and a nice showcase for Gene Wilder. Richard Pryor, as a thief, doesn't appear until late in the film but steals most of it.

Wilder plays George, a man in publishing, who explains to a blonde he picks up on the train, Hilly (Jill Clayburgh), that he's edited sex books but what he's really good at is editing gardening books. This leads to him murmuring advice on raising azaleas in their sex scene which was kind of funny and sexy but mainly made me feel like the two of them would be completely over each other in the morning.

Wilder is great, though, and nicely subtle. There's a moment I really liked when she asks him why he'd gotten a divorce. The quiet struggle you see him go through, trying to decide how to explain succinctly what must be a complicated and painful matter, that's brilliant.

Then George sees a dead man thrown off the train--but briefly and after he's had a lot drink. So Hilly can convince him it was his imagination. Of course it wasn't and there's a gang of thugs aboard which includes Ray Walston and Richard Kiel.

Kiel has metal teeth in this movie a year before he first appeared in a James Bond movie as Jaws. I wonder if he was cast in Bond because someone really thought he had metal teeth.

George gets kicked off the train a few times. He meets Pryor on one of these occasions. He's a thief named Grover who decides to help George for reasons that are never made clear in the screenplay. Fortunately, the affection Wilder and Pryor had for each other is so evident that you don't really need an explanation.

I got the feeling George and Grover will be together long after Hilly leaves the picture.

Silver Streak is available on The Criterion Channel until September 30.

The Robber and the Rabbi of the Old West

In theory a Western comedy starring Gene Wilder and Harrison Ford doesn't seem like necessarily a bad idea. But 1979's The Frisco Kid stumbles primarily on the conceptual level; in never finds a good tone for its initial idea. Mostly the ingredients are fine, particularly the stars, and I found myself liking the characters played by Wilder and Ford. And I found myself regarding the screenplay as the film's true villain for what it was doing to such a nice couple of guys.

Wilder plays a young man named Avram Belinski who leaves Poland at the beginning of the film to be the new rabbi for a congregation in San Francisco. His naivete and inexperience quickly get him into trouble and he's robbed on the road in Pennsylvania, the three crooks leaving him stranded in his underwear. It's a scene that seems like it was meant to be funny but just comes off as sad.

Avram's relieved to find most of his possessions abandoned on the road; he's especially happy to find his Torah, and I was happy he got it back, too--it seemed a particularly sadistic thing for the thief to take. Already I was pulling for Avram even as the energy of the scenes seemed to imply I was meant to be laughing at him.

He comes across a group of Amish farmers (it's hard to remember this is supposed to be Pennsylvania from the landscape) and he mistakes them for Jews. Certainly their attire is similar but this was another thing that seems like it was meant to be funny but works out to be just mildly interesting and very quickly I wondered why the film was dwelling on this.

When Avram finally meets Tommy Lillard, the bank robber played by Harrison Ford, the film continues its theme of Avram and the people he meets being surprised by differences and commonalities between Jews and everyone else. There's a particularly lame joke about horse tucus.

But the two actors have so much charisma that their friendship becomes genuinely sweet. Tommy knows his way around the wild west better than Avram but in his own way he clearly needs guidance and I liked the conclusion of the film which was very much about what being a rabbi can mean in the wild west. It's a nice sentiment if positioned in awkwardly contrived circumstances.

It was nice seeing Wilder in such a low key role, too. His face often seems like its ready to burst forth with some barely contained emotion so it's really effective when it doesn't, his eyes just water and his face turns red. And then a moment later he pulls it all back in--he's really good. Harrison Ford, of course, has that rough charm which mixes well with a quality of innocence I don't think I've seen in any of his other roles. If only the film didn't waste so much time trying to make jokes that simply weren't there.

Twitter Sonnet #1193

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Sapphire sharks were tiny specks on ties.
A set of suits prepared a starched surprise.