Top 10 Films About Trains: Thrillers

All aboard for the second Cinema Paradiso excursion to see how trains have featured on the big screen! We've already looked at Westerns and war movies. Next stop, thrillers.

One of the most iconic moments in cinema history involved a train. According to legend, when Auguste and Louis Lumière's L'Arrivée d'un train en gare de La Ciotat was first shown to paying customers in December 1895, they fled in terror because they thought that the steam locomotive pulling into the platform was going to come through the screen and crush them. The film that inspired this apocryphal anecdote can be rented from Cinema Paradiso on the BFI's marvellous 2005 collection, Early Cinema Primitives and Pioneers (1895-1910) .

Walter Booth used models to give audiences a shunt in A Railway Collision (1900), which shows a train backing through a signal into an oncoming express. It's available to rent,. on another BFI disc, R.W. Paul: The Collected Films 1895-1908 (2006), and is significant because its technique was copied by film-makers for decades to come, including such giants as Alfred Hitchcock.

Audiences certainly responded to the excitement of such visceral images and the makers of the first serials exploited this thrill factor by devising cliffhanging endings to each episode of their chapterplays. A popular ploy was to have a villain in a top hats twiddle his moustache while tying the heroine to a railroad track in classic adventures like The Perils of Pauline (1914) and The Hazards of Helen (1914-15), which inspired The Wacky Races (1968-69) spin-off, The Perils of Penelope Pitstop (1969).

The Italian maestro Federico Fellini once claimed, 'Our duty as storytellers is to bring people to the station. There each person will choose his or her own train…But we must at least take them to the station…to a point of departure.' So, let's see where this journey of cinematic discovery will take us.

First-Class Thrills

Trains make excellent settings for thrillers. The enclosed space of the carriages and absence of easy exits means that the characters are kept in close proximity to one another, so that no one can escape as the locomotive hurtles between stations. However, they also offer hiding places in the luggage compartment and the guard's van, while extra jeopardy can be applied by setting scenes on the footplate or the roof.

Trains run by timetable, which lends the action a timeframe that heightens suspense, while the sense of gliding speed across the rails sweeps the audience along with the protagonist's seemingly unstoppable destiny. Transcontinental journeys added a sense of the exotic and the unknown, as was the case with Walter Forde's Rome Express (1932). This captured the decade's growing unease as fascist parties began emerging across Europe and Cold War tensions similarly simmered in John Paddy Carstairs's remake, Sleeping Car to Trieste (1948), which follows agent Albert Lieven and accomplice Jean Kent, as they flee with secrets stolen from an embassy in Paris. The same year saw Jacques Tourneur exploit Germany's bomb-damaged landscape to lend a sobering authenticity to Berlin Express, which centres on the efforts of Frenchwoman Merle Oberon and American Robert Ryan to find kidnapped diplomat, Paul Lukas.

Alfred Hitchcock could never resist trains. Having cameo'd as a Tube passenger being plagued by a pesky schoolboy in Blackmail (1929), he made spectacular use of an express bound for the coast in Number Seventeen (1932), as thieves attempt to retrieve a stolen necklace and detective John Stuart chases after them on a speeding bus. Even in an age of CGI effects, the dockside denouement still causes a judder.

The match cut between a screaming landlady and the whistle of the Flying Scotsman in The 39 Steps (1935) also remains masterly. Robert Donat excels as accidental hero, Richard Hannay, and his escape from the train on the Forth Bridge (which wasn't in John Buchan's source novel) was later recreated by Kenneth More and Robert Powell in the film remakes directed by Ralph Thomas (1959) and Don Sharp (1979) . However, it was absent from James Hawes's 2008 BBC version starring Rupert Penry-Jones, s it went back to basics.

Madeleine Carroll had played Donat's reluctant travelling companion and she finds herself in another tricky situation aboard a train in Turkey with John Gielgud in Secret Agent (1936), which was adapted from a couple of W. Somerset Maugham's spy stories. Josephine Tey's A Shilling For Candles provided the inspiration for Young and Innocent (1937), which amusingly blends live-action footage and some model railway effects to show a steam engine blocking the road so that Nova Pilbeam can help wrongly accused fugitive Derrick De Marney dodge the police.

Hitch's finest train hour, however, occurs in The Lady Vanishes (1938), which was scripted by Frank Launder and Sidney Gilliat (the latter had written Rome Express before the pair dabbled with trains and missing people in Albert De Courville's Seven Sinners, 1936). Margaret Lockwood tries to convince Michael Redgrave that Dame May Whitty has vanished from a train out of the Balkan state of Bandrika (and she would have similar trouble with agent Rex Harrison in Carol Reed's Night Train to Munich, 1940). Once again, Hitchcock makes the most of the confined setting (note his use of lighting and back projection to create a sense of motion). Sadly, Don Sharp's 1978 remake is unavailable, but Cinema Paradiso members can compare the original with Diarmud Lawrence's BBC remake (2013) .

A dark tunnel gives Cary Grant a chance to make the acquaintance of Joan Fontaine in Suspicion (1941). He claims he brushed her leg accidentally, although she's far from convinced. Yet she's intrigued by the way he sweet talks the ticket collector after being caught in a first class compartment with a third class ticket. Having been nominated for Rebecca (1940), Fontaine became the sole winner of an acting Oscar in a Hitchcock picture. But both Teresa Wright and Joseph Cotten contribute fine performances to Shadow of a Doubt (1943), which opens with the former excitedly awaiting her favourite uncle at the Santa Rosa train station. We catch sight of Hitchcock playing cards in a carriage, but it's the layout of the tracks that causes amnesiac Gregory Peck to have a fragmentary flashback while travelling to Rochester, New York with psychoanalyst Ingrid Bergman in Spellbound (1945).

Hitchcock can be seen on the platform of a Cumberland halt carrying a cello in The Paradine Case (1947). But he's lugging a double bass when he boards the service in Strangers on a Train (1951), a gripping take on a Patricia Highsmith novel that included Raymond Chandler among its screenwriters. Hitch passes tennis player Farley Granger, as he disembarks having just met Robert Walker, who has just proposed a supposedly foolproof method of swapping murders. Danny DeVito doubled as director and star in his darkly comic remake, Throw Momma From the Train (1987), which required Billy Crystal to dispose of the formidable Anne Ramsey.

Musician Henry Fonda is glimpsed making fantasy bets on the horses while riding the subway in The Wrong Man (1956). But Hitchcock's train fixation cooled over the decade. That said, 1959 was a bumper year for sleeping-car scenes, as not only does Billy Wilder include a doozy in Some Like It Hot, but Hitchcock also parted company with Cary Grant and Eva Marie Saint around bedtime in North By Northwest, just as their train is about to enter a tunnel, in fact. Contrasting the Freudian innuendo of that finale, Hitchcock begins Marnie (1964) with a character revealing shot, as Tippi Hedren sashays along a platform. As the moving camera halts to let her pass by, leaving us with little doubt that she is the thief being discussed in the following sequence. However, the framing of her isolated body parts would draw the ire of film-maker Nina Menkes in Brainwashed: Sex-Camera-Power, a lecture documentary about the 'male gaze' that will hopefully secure a release after its showing at the 66th BFI London Film Festival, as it will forever change the way you watch film and television.

Compartment Noir

The sheer size of the United States means that stations are often a long way apart. This made trains the perfect setting for thrillers, as the heroes and villains were trapped in confined quarters. Even brief encounters gained in intensity, such as when hitman Alan Ladd finds himself seated next to magician's assistant Veronica Lake on a train from San Francisco to Los Angeles without knowing that they have the sinister Laird Cregar in common in Frank Tuttle's This Gun For Hire (1942), which was adapted from an entertainment by Graham Greene.

The master detective from 221B Baker Street (Basil Rathbone) is joined by the trusty Dr Watson (Nigel Bruce) to investigate when a spy is killed on a train after handing over a microfilm in a box of matches in Roy William Neill's Sherlock Holmes in Washington (1943). The game was also afoot after the Star of Rhodesia is stolen on the London to Edinburgh train in Neill's Terror By Night (1946), which is an original Holmes case, despite borrowing from a quartet of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's stories.

The skullduggery is of the murderous kind in the train sequence in Billy Wilder's Double Indemnity (1944), as Barbara Stanwyck and Fred MacMurray have concocted an ingenious method of disposing of her dead husband's body that involves a pair of crutches and a very public kiss at Glendale Station. Grand Central Station in New York provides the more imposing destination for Deanna Durbin in Charles David's Lady on a Train (1945). Before the service arrives, however, she witnesses a murder in a building abutting the track and only crime novelist David Bruce believes her claim.

This change of pace for songstress Durbin was based on a story by Leslie Charteris (the creator of The Saint). It bears a resemblance to Agatha Christie's 1957 whodunit, 4:50 From Paddington, which was reworked for George Pollock's Murder, She Said (1961), which stars Margaret Rutherford as Miss Jane Marple. Emily Blunt also trusts the evidence of her own eyes while on her daily commute to New York in Tate Taylor's take on the Paula Hawkins bestseller, The Girl on the Train (2016).

Two more films bearing the same title couldn't be more different. In André Téchine's The Girl on the Train (2009), Émilie Dequenne claims to have been the victim of anti-Semitic abuse aboard an RER local in order to gain some sympathy from mother Catherine Deneuve. But it's documentary film-maker Henry Ian Cusick who finds himself as the prime suspect after a chance meeting with Nicki Aycox on a service out of Grand Central sends his life into a spin in Larry Brand's The Girl on the Train (2013).

Unaware that they are linked to a boarding house in Reno, Nevada, divorcée Claire Trevor and killer Lawrence Tierney take a fancy to each other on a train to San Francisco in Robert Wise's first noir, Born to Kill (1947), which was adapted from James Gunn's pulp thriller, Deadlier Than the Male.

Scripted by the Oscar-nominated Earl Felton, Richard Fleischer's The Narrow Margin (1952) is one of the finest train-board thrillers ever made, as it follows the efforts of LAPD detective Charles McGraw to outsmart the murderous coterie detailed to prevent him from delivering Chicago mobster's widow Marie Windsor to a grand jury courtroom. Indeed, it was such a gripping story that Peter Hyams's remade it as Narrow Margin (1990), with Gene Hackman as the deputy district attorney seeking to protect Anne Archer on a trip through the Canadian wilderness.

Another tale well worth telling twice owes its origins to an 1890 Rougon-Macquart novel by Émile Zola. The steam engine sequences in Jean Renoir's La Bête Humaine (1938) are thrilling for both cineastes and trainspotters, as Jean Gabin rides the footplate with stoker Julien Carette while being entangled in an adulterous affair with stationmaster Fernand Ledoux's wife, Simone Simon. Glenn Ford finds himself at the controls of a streamliner in Fritz Lang's remake, Human Desire (1953), but faces a similar dilemma with Gloria Grahame, the wife of assistant yard supervisor, Broderick Crawford.

Test audiences had been so uninspired by the original opening to John Sturges's Bad Day At Black Rock (1955) that producer Herman Hoffman cut a deal with the Southern Pacific Railroad to have a gleaming streamliner cross the Californian desert before gliding into the town where a one-armed stranger (Spencer Tracy) is intent on uncovering the fate of a Japanese migrant.

There's nothing so confrontationally evocative in Compton Bennett's The Flying Scot (1957), but this British programmer (written by future Carry On scribe Norman Hudis) does boast an intriguing premise, as Lee Paterson, Kay Callard and Alan Gifford plan to burrow through a compartment seat into the strongroom containing half a million in banknotes. Smooth-talking crook Terence Morgan takes the Underground route to an embassy safe in Wolf Rilla's Piccadilly Third Stop (1960), as his gang tunnels in through Belgravia Station. There's nothing so subtle about the actions of Tony Musante and Martin Sheen, however, as they hold 14 people hostage on a New York subway train bound for Times Square in Larry Pearce's The Incident (1967). Thelma Ritter, Brock Peters, Ruby Dee, Jack Gifford and Beau Bridges form part of an excellent ensemble.

Racial tensions are also in evidence in Norman Jewison's In the Heat of the Night (1967), as Virgil Tibbs (Sidney Poitier) is arrested at the station in a small Mississippi town on suspicion of murder. However, Chief Gillespie (the Oscar-winning Rod Steiger) begs him to stay and help solve the case. Rajesh Khanna is enlisted to investigate the murder of several passengers in Ravikant Nagaich's The Train (1970), a Bollywood thriller that reworked M. Krishnan Nair's Malayalam-language classic, Cochin Express (1967). Also released in 1970, Jean-Pierre Melville's Le Cercle Rouge (1970) sees prisoner Gian Maria Volonté unpick his handcuffs while in express transit from Marseilles to Paris and strikes out across country with Inspector André Bouvil in hot pursuit.

Railway boss John Carradine does all the chasing in Martin Scorsese's second feature, Boxcar Bertha (1972), a Roger Corman production that sees Barbara Hershey form a bank- and train-robbing gang with David Carradine, Bernie Casey and Barry Primus. Set slightly before the Great Depression, Richard Linklater's The Newton Boys (1998) also sees Texan siblings Matthew McConaughey, Ethan Hawke, Skeet Ulrich and Vincent D'Onofrio come a cropper when they attempt a nocturnal train robbery with their nytroglycerin expert, Dwight Yoakim.

The mid-1930s provides the setting for George Roy Hill's The Sting (1973), which ventures aboard the Twentieth Century to witness con man Henry Gondorff (Paul Newman) lure crime boss Doyle Lonnegan (Robert Shaw) into a trap during a poker game. This Best Picture winner was inspired by a true story, as was the 1934 Agatha Christie whodunit that was filmed four decades later. Sidney Lumet's Murder on the Orient Express (1974) is set aboard the luxurious locomotive travelling from Istanbul and follows Hercule Poirot (Albert Finney), as he applies his little grey cells to the murder of Samuel Ratchett (Richard Widmark). Sporting a considerably larger moustache (which would have pleased Christie), Kenneth Branagh sees through the lies of another all-star cast in his self-directed 2017 remake.

Writing under the pen name John Godey, Morton Freedgood created another rattling yarn that simply had to be revisited. In Joseph Sargent's The Taking of Pelham One Two Three (1974), Walter Matthau plays the New York City Transit Police lieutenant, while Robert Shaw leads the gang that has taken control of a subway train from the Bronx and is demanding a ransom for the safe release of its passengers (Note that Quentin Tarantino would borrow the crew's colourful codenames for Reservoir Dogs, 1992). In Tony Scott's The Taking of Pelham 123 (2009), the respective roles passed to Denzel Washington and John Travolta.

While we're on the theme of literary reboots, a Patricia Highsmith tome provided the basis for both Wim Wenders's The American Friend (1977) and Liliana Cavani's Ripley's Game (2002). Trains feature in each, with Bruno Ganz's dying picture framer being forced to shoot one gangster in a Paris Métro station and garrote another (with a little help from Dennis Hopper) on an express. The latter scene is reproduced with Dougray Scott and John Malkovich teaming to dispatch their target and his two bodyguards in the train lavatory.

Just about every inch of the eponymous engine comes into play in Arthur Hiller's Silver Streak, after book editor Gene Wilder sees a Rembrandt expert being flung into the undergrowth. Despite being repeatedly ejected from the Los Angeles to Chicago service, he manages to save the day with the help of academic Jill Clayburgh and petty thief Richard Pryor, in the first of his four teamings with Wilder. Markedly more sombre, George Pan Cosmatos's The Cassandra Crossing (both 1976) sees a plague-infected Swedish terrorist board a train travelling from Geneva to Stockholm that is diverted over a rickety bridge so that the passengers can be quarantined in a former Nazi concentration camp in Poland.

Directing from a script adapted from his own book, Michael Crichton takes us further back in time for The First Great Train Robbery (1978), a costume caper that is set in 1855 and charts the attempt made by high society cracksman Sean Connery and accomplices Donald Sutherland and Lesley Anne Down to steal from the London train to Folkestone a shipment of gold bound for the Crimean War.

Journey's End

Stations have often provided evocative settings for significant scenes, such as the washroom murder witnessed by Amish boy Lukas Haas in Peter Weir's Witness (1985). This was filmed at the 30th Street Station in Philadelphia, which has also featured in the aforementioned Marnie, Brian De Palma's Blow Out (1981) and John Landis's Trading Places (1983). It's a particular favourite of M. Night Shyamalan, who has used the station for scenes in Unbreakable (2000), The Happening (2008), The Visit (2015) and Glass (2019).

Needing a staircase to pay homage to the famous Odessa Steps sequence in Sergei Eisenstein's Battleship Potemkin (1925), Brian De Palma descended upon Union Station in Chicago for the climactic shootout in The Untouchables (1985), which sees Eliot Ness (Kevin Costner) catch up with a runaway perambulator. De Palma would plump for Grand Central Station in New York for Al Pacino's supine descent on the escalator in Carlito's Way (1993).

This landmark on 42nd Street has also cropped up in films as varied as Richard Thorpe's The Thin Man Goes Home (1944), Vincente Minnelli's The Band Wagon (1953), John Frankenheimer's Seconds (1966), Gene Kelly's Hello, Dolly! (1969), William Friedkin's The French Connection (1971), Francis Ford Coppola's The Cotton Club (1984), Peter Yates's The House on Carroll Street (1988), Andrew Bergman's The Freshman (1990), Barbra Streisand's The Prince of Tides (1991), Michael Hoffman's One Fine Day (1996), Ang Lee's The Ice Storm (1997), Michael Bay's Armageddon (1998), Barry Sonnenfeld's Men in Black II (2002), Francis Lawrence's I Am Legend (2007), Sam Mendes's Revolutionary Road (2008), Jason Winer's Arthur, Will Gluck's Friends With Benefits (both 2011), Joss Whedon's The Avengers (2012) and Chad Stahelski's John Wick: Chapter 3 - Parabellum (2019).

By far the most magical sequence sees the concourse turned into a ballroom in Terry Gilliam's The Fisher King (1991), but we'll return to this in a later entry in Cinema Paradiso's comprehensive look at trains on screen. In the meantime, we'll get back on track with bounty hunter Robert De Niro and embezzling accountant Charles Grodin hopping on to a freight train boxcar in Martin Brest's cross-country caper, Midnight Run (1988). It's a sleeping car that captures the imagination of Jean-Marc Barr, as it's rope-towed out of a storage shed in Lars von Trier's Europa (1991), an exposé of a postwar Nazi conspiracy that also includes a poignant scene in which Barr touches hands with Barbara Sukova through a barred window, as their trains pass in close proximity.

Having excelled as Len Deighton's secret agent, Harry Palmer, in Sidney J. Furie's The Ipcress File (1965), Guy Hamilton's Funeral in Berlin (1966) and Ken Russell's Billion Dollar Brain (1967), Michael Caine returned to the role for two tele-outings with Jason Connery as Soviet agent, Nikolai Petrov: George Mihalka's Bullet to Beijing (1995) and Douglas Jackson's Midnight in St Petersburg (1996). The former sees them searching the Bullet train for a top secret biological weapon, although they have to take a flight on a rickety plane after they are turfed off the train in Siberia.

A Grand Continental rolling through the Rockies en route from Denver to Los Angeles provides the setting for Geoff Murphy's Under Siege 2: Dark Territory (1995), a sequel to Andrew Davis's Under Siege (1992) that sees ex-Navy SEAL Casey Ryback (Steven Seagal) trouble the terrorists who have taken the passengers hostage to gain access to some weapon codes. Some decommissioned warheads are the target of the train-jackers in Mimi Leder's The Peacemaker (1997), as a deadly crash alerts US Ranger George Clooney and Nicole Kidman from the National Security Council Nuclear Smuggling Group to a robbery by a Russian general and a rogue Spetznatz unit.

Foster brothers and transit cops Wesley Snipes and Woody Harrelson have their sights on the New York subway takings in a daring New Year's Eve heist in Joseph Ruben's Money Train (1995). The repair yards on the same system provide an atmospheric setting for James Gray's The Yards (2000), a gritty thriller that sees parolee Mark Wahlberg learn the brutal truth about how Joaquin Phoenix and James Caan get contracts for their business.

At the start of the week in which he is due to undergo a triple bypass operation, retired teacher Jean Rochefort befriends stranger Johnny Hallyday, who has designs on a small-town bank in Patrice Leconte's Man on the Train (2002). Mary McGuckian's 2011 remake with Donald Sutherland and Larry Mullen, Jr. isn't on disc. But Cinema Paradiso users can learn what happens to Chicago advertising executive Clive Owen when he falls for fellow train commuter Jennifer Aniston in Mikael Håfström's Derailed (2005). This isn't to be confused with Bob Misiorowski's Derailed (2002), which presents NATO agent Jean-Claude Van Damme with the task of regaining control of a train bound for Munich that has been infected with smallpox, thanks to master criminal Tomas Arana and virus thief Laura Harring.

Catching the last train home usually brings a huge sigh of relief. But three films suggest that leaving it so late isn't always the best option. In Christopher Smith's Creep (2004), Franka Potente makes the mistake of dozing off on the platform and boarding a train after Charing Cross Underground has already closed for the night. This sickening tale of subterranean cannibalism finds echo in Ryuhei Kitamura's The Midnight Meat Train (2008), an adaptation of a Clive Barker short story that sees photographer Bradley Cooper board the last subway and witness a massacre conducted by New York butcher, Vinnie Jones.

Widowed doctor Dougray Scott and his young son are pleased to have caught the night service to Tunbridge Wells, until they realise they're on a runaway train in Omid Nooshin's Last Passenger (2013). The problem with the Eastborough train in Paul Hyett's Howl (2015) is that it does stop and in the middle of dense woodland after colliding with a deer and leaving the passengers, replacement guard Ed Speleers and trolley hostess Holly Weston at the mercy of a werewolf.

May we suggest that you don't watch Timur Bekmambetov's Wanted (2008) if you have a train to catch, especially if it has to cross a bridge. Angelina Jolie's method of on-train parking isn't recommended, either. But if you just want your socks knocked off by a train scene, then order this rattling thriller from Cinema Paradiso on high-quality DVD or Blu-ray and keep your head down when James McAvoy and Thomas Kretschmann start firing curving bullets in the compartment. Angelina Jolie makes a less spectacular entrance when she introduces herself to Johnny Depp on a train from Paris to Venice in order to throw cop Paul Bettany and mobster Steven Berkoff off the track in Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck's The Tourist (2010).

Even though it follows a track encircling the Earth, the journey can hardly be said to be smooth in Bong Joon-ho's Snowpiercer (2013), which draws on a graphic novel by the French triumvirate of Jacques Lob, Benjamin Legrand and Jean-Marc Rochette. Seventeen years have passed since an attempt to arrest global warming started an ice age. But the occupants of the rear carriages of the train carrying the last surviving humans have grown tired of their third-class existence. The ensemble cast is exceptional and it's none too shabby in Daniel Espinosa's adaptation of Tom Rob Smith's bestseller, Child 44 (2015). Harking back to the Soviet Union in the last days of Joseph Stalin's rule, it follows the efforts of MGB agent Tom Hardy to track down the serial killer who uses the country's railway network to commit their crimes.

Hardy survives an assassination attempt while being transported to a gulag in this fact-based procedural and an incidence of true-life heroism inspires Clint Eastwood's The 15:17 to Paris (2018), which unusually stars Spencer Stone, Anthony Sadler and Alex Skarlatos as themselves in a recreation of their fearless rearguard against an armed terrorist aboard a Thalys train from Amsterdam Centraal in 2015. That year saw Liam Neeson star in Jaume Collet-Sera's Run All Night, after they had previously collaborated on Unknown (2011) and Non-Stop (2014). They would reunite on The Commuter (2018), which requires Neeson's insurance agent to travel daily on the Hudson Line from Tarrytown to Grand Central Terminal. On the day he's laid off, however, he's approached on the journey home by Vera Farmiga, who makes him an offer he soon wishes he had refused.

As we saw in our Getting to Know Denzel Washington article, the two-time Oscar winner has forged a recurring working relationship with director Antoine Fuqua. In The Equalizer 2 (2018), Robert McCall has a trainboard encounter with an abusive Turkish father who has abducted his nine year-old daughter and it doesn't end well for him or his trio of lunkheaded bodyguards. Fuqua also served as a producer on David Leitch's Bullet Train (2022), which pitches a onetime assassin codenamed Ladybug (Brad Pitt) on to the high-speed service from Tokyo to Kyoto in order to acquire a briefcase from a Russian mafioso nicknamed 'The White Death' (Michael Shannon) and his British hitmen, Tangerine (Aaron Taylor Johnson), and his twin brother, Lemon (Brian Tyree Henry), who rather fittingly has an obsession with Thomas the Tank Engine.