Silver Streak is a 1976 comedy, action and mystery film about murder on a Los Angeles-to-Chicago train journey. It stars Gene Wilder, Jill Clayburgh, Richard Pryor, Patrick McGoohan and Ned Beatty and is directed by Arthur Hiller. The film score is by Henry Mancini. This film marked the first pairing of Wilder and Pryor, who would become a well-known comedy duo. The climax of the film includes footage of an out-of-control train crashing through the wall of Union Station in Chicago.
Synopsis
Saying he "just wanted to be bored," book editor George Caldwell (Gene Wilder) travels from Los Angeles to Chicago aboard a train called the Silver Streak. As the trip begins, George meets a man who calls himself Bob Sweet (Ned Beatty) and has dinner with a woman named Hilly Burns (Jill Clayburgh) who works for Professor Schreiner, an art historian who is publicizing his new book on Rembrandt. After dinner, George and Hilly go to Hilly's room.
Meanwhile, three men kill Schreiner. A few minutes later, George momentarily sees Schreiner's body outside Hilly's window. In the morning, he sees Schreiner's photograph on the cover of his book, which Hilly has with her, and recognizes him as the dead man. George also finds an envelope inside the book.
The men who killed Schreiner are Johnson, a small man named Whiney, and a large man named Reace. When George goes to Schreiner's room, Whiney answers the door and Rease throws George off the train, but George meets an old lady who flies him to the train's next stopping point in a biplane. Back on the train, he sees Hilly dining with art dealer Roger Devereau (Patrick McGoohan). He begins to suspect her when Devereau, Whiney, and Rease enter her room with Johnson impersonating Schreiner. They apologize to him and mention "the Rembrandt letters".
Later, Sweet tells George that he is a federal agent named Stevens and that Devereau is a criminal. Whiney, Rease, and Johnson are Devereau's henchmen. According to Schreiner's book, two paintings authenticated by Devereau are forgeries. George remembers the envelope he saw inside Schreiner's book, and the two men go to Hilly's room, where they find the envelope containing letters written by Rembrandt, proving Devereau's guilt.
After this discovery, Stevens is killed and George is carried off the train by an overhanging pole after shooting Rease on the roof with a speargun. George tries to notify the local sheriff, but is forced to steal a patrol car, in which he meets small-time thief Grover T. Muldoon (Richard Pryor). Working as a team, George and Grover make their way to Kansas City to meet the train. Police are looking for George, so Grover disguises him as a flamboyant black man. Once they are on the train, Whiney knocks George unconscious and takes him and Hilly to Devereau's room. Devereau plans to kill George and Hilly, but Grover enters the room and holds Devereau at gunpoint. After a shootout, George and Grover jump off the train and are arrested and taken to the police station, where federal agent Donaldson explains that the police were trying to protect George. Donaldson orders his men to prepare for an attack on the train.
Meanwhile, Devereau burns the Rembrandt letters, and he and his henchmen prepare to escape. Once the train has stopped and the passengers have disembarked, a shootout ensues. George and Grover jump onto the train as Devereau orders an engineer to start it moving again. An agent shoots Whiney, George shoots Johnson, and Devereau shoots the engineer and places a toolbox on the accelerator pedal. Devereau is then shot by an agent and decapitated by an oncoming train.
With Devereau and his men gone, George and Grover stop the train while federal agents evacuate people from a nearby shopping mall. Following instructions from the porter, George disconnects the cars, leaving the engine to smash into the mall as people flee. Grover steals a sportscar and drives away, and George and Hilly kiss.
Featured cast
Two actors from the James Bond franchise appear in this film. Clifton James appears as Sheriff Oliver Chauncey; he previously played a similar character, Sheriff J.W. Pepper, in Live and Let Die and a year later in The Man With the Golden Gun. Seven-foot-two actor Richard Kiel appears as a murderous henchman with strange-looking teeth; he would play a very similar character, Jaws, a year later in the James Bond film The Spy Who Loved Me and two years after that in Moonraker.
Reception
- The film grossed over $51,000,000 at the box office during its run and was well received by critics. Roger Ebert had also given the film a positive review. The film was the first collaboration between Gene Wilder and Richard Pryor. Pryor was a writer on, and the original choice for "Black Bart," in the Mel Brooks film Blazing Saddles, which also starred Wilder. The two would later go on to make more films together: Stir Crazy, See No Evil, Hear No Evil and Another You.
Awards and honors
American Film Institute recognition
Production
Although set in the United States and on the fictional railroad "AMRoad" (loosely based on Amtrak trains), Silver Streak was shot primarily in Canada (with the exception of Union Station in Los Angeles). All exterior train shots were filmed on the Canadian Pacific Railway (CPR) in Alberta and Toronto; Amtrak reportedly backed out of the project due to disapproval of the scenes in which Caldwell accidentally bursts into Burns' bedroom while she is dressing, and the film's ending with the out-of-control train crashing through the terminal wall in Chicago.
Scenes of Midwestern U.S. landscapes appear behind train layouts and many action shots (as the protagonist and allies battle the villains on and off the train, and get thrown off or jump on and off the moving trains) to add narrative integrity to the fictional location. Most of the interior station scenes set both in Kansas City and Chicago actually show Toronto's Union Station, except for a brief sequence immediately prior to the crash where the train is rapidly approaching a bumper at the end of the line. That sequence was filmed from a Hi-Rail truck, entering the Chicago and North Western Railway's downtown Chicago terminal.
The train set was so lightly disguised as the fictional "AMRoad" that the locomotives and cars still carried their original names and numbers, along with the easily-identifiable CPR red-striped paint scheme. At the start of the climactic shootout, a CPR GM switcher is seen calmly moving cars in the background. Most of the cars are still in revenue service on VIA Rail Canada. CP 4070, the lead locomotive, is in Québec, but the second unit, CP 4067, has been scrapped.
Score and soundtrack
Even though the film dates to 1976, Henry Mancini's score was never officially released as a soundtrack before his death in 1994. When Intrada Records released a compilation in 2002, 26 years after the film's release, it became one of the Top Special Releases of 2002.
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