TRAIN THAT GETS SCREEN FANS

Chronicle (Levin), 14 September 1946, Page 6

TRAIN THAT GETS SCREEN FANS

There has always been something about the mere thought of taking a train ride that has made little boys and girls of staid men and women — that is, a train ride apart from the season ticket to the city offlce. . Although in the past few years, travel has become difficult, still the mere mention of a train trip to; ,the average person brings a glint of nostafgic wanderlust to usually contented eyes. Whether or not the condition' of immobility forced on the public'by patriotism or claustrophobia, . ' or both, has had anything to do with the fact that moving picture p'roducers have seen an excellent medium for the vicarious fulfillment of wishful thinking, I cahnot say. But moving picture producers are well known for their astuteness in giving their public what it wants. Stories in full or in part, laid on a train have been and still are in the neWs of the theatrical page. The latest of these is "One Way to Love," the hilarious story of two radio writers heading for Hollywood and a thousand-dollar-a-week contract. What goes on during the trip is everybody's business, to the despair of the long-suffering guard. The first train story and probably the one holding the most revered place - in Hollywood's ' hall' of fame, is "The Great Train- Robbery," filmed in those dim dead days when the public thrived on oreath-taking adventures. It was revived by Republic in 1941. Not far behind that epic in fame or after it in time is Mack Sennett's "The Fast Train Through Arkansas." A masterpiece of its day," whenever the engine hit a small hill en route it huffed and it puffed and blew its boiler in and out like a human diaphragm. Since those early days, trains as backgrounds for both melodrama and comedy have been many and memorable. In more recent' years tliere have been the English-made thrillers "Night Train" with Margaret Lockwood and Paul Henreid, "The Lady Vanishes" with Paul Lukas, Margaret Lockwod and Michael Redgrave. Marlene Dietrich set a model for future melodramatic glamour in "Shanghai Express," and do you remembef that hilarious comedy "Twentieth Century" starring the late John Barrymore and the late Carol Lombard? Just in the past few months, Deanna Durbin departed from her usual type of film to appear in a mystery chiller, "Lady on a Train." There are many more in the film archives, and undoubtedly others will follow. There seems to be something about a train that gets the screen fans.