Caught on a Train (1980)
Kafka meets Kraftwerk...
Welcome back to WEEKEND FLICKS. Cinema for Grown Ups.
ALL ABOARD: Two Films on the Tracks
This weekend, two brilliant films on a decidedly railway theme. First up — Stephen Poliakoff’s chiselled, perceptive, Kafkaesque Caught on a Train, first shown as part of the BBC2 Playhouse series in the autumn of 1980. And then on Sunday, in our regular post for free subscribers, we’ll return with a cracking tale of murder, luxury and intrigue, set amongst the international rich in the mid 1930s.
Caught on a Train (1980), despite a brief interlude at the Frankfurt opera house (set to Richard Strauss’s Der Rosenkavalier), is almost entirely set on the Ostend to Vienna Trans-Continental Express. Peter (Michael Kitchen), a young PR executive at a London publishing house, is on his way to a book fair in Linz. You might call him a yuppie. Articulate, good-looking, sharp-suited in grey, a quip at the ready — easy in a meeting — slightly full of himself, pompous even, with a boarding school education (note how he slides it into the conversation), and more or less absorbed — with himself. But what should have been a relatively straightforward, even enjoyable, train journey descends into a Kafkaesque nightmare. It’s like one of those anxiety dreams where you’re trying to get somewhere, and you’re constantly thwarted, or you’re sitting an exam the next morning, and you’re utterly unprepared.
I like trains. Or, at least, I like the idea of a train journey. It’s undeniably romantic. The overnight sleeper from London Olympia to Inverness had (or has?) more than a whiff of The Thirty-Nine Steps: Richard Hannay chased across purple moors, dastardly Prussian agents and Bleriot monoplanes: a hearty, bracing breakfast of poached eggs, kedgeree and kippers at the Royal Highland Hotel — all stag’s antlers, Queen Victoria and tartan carpets. It was the same with the Paris to Milan Express, which you take before changing at Milano for Venice — on the old route of the Orient Express (or at least, via the Simplon tunnel), you know, that rather ordinary-looking French businessmen reading Le Figaro, the one with the neat little glasses and the clean, printed silk tie, iPhone carefully placed on the fold-down plastic in front of him, sitting opposite you, might, actually be a deviant Albanian spy on the run, or a criminal mastermind plotting murder most foul.
Cue Lorraine (Wendy Raebeck), passenger number two — an attractive American late twenty-something (blonde highlights), presumably a tourist sightseeing across Europe, although, perhaps, she seems a little too old to be a single, lone backpacker. And, of course, there’s an instant, superficial sexual frisson, at least from the point of view of Peter, who’s hoping, no doubt, that somehow, things might lead to a roll in the sack. Despite their good looks, they have, of course, otherwise absolutely nothing in common, and there’s Lorraine’s devastating, cutting dismissal towards the end of the film:
We Americans are supposed to find it so amazing over here, don’t we? Well I don’t. The atmosphere here is just, well. So ugly. It’s extraordinary really. But I just want to go home. I can’t wait to get back. I’ll be counting the days, I know it. I just really don’t like it. I hate it.
There’s an underlying melancholy. Perhaps there are problems at home (a boyfriend, work or parent crisis), and Lorraine’s European excursion is some form of escape? Which is exactly how it is in real life. The point is that you meet people on your travels, in a bar or on the beach, on a train, on a long-distance coach or an aeroplane, or you go on a date - and you know absolutely nothing at all about that other person: their backgrounds, their anxieties, their worries, their faults, what they’re really thinking. How they function. And yet, you superimpose your fantasies, dreams, hopes, desires and expectations onto strangers of whom you know nothing.
Back in the 90s, I travelled to America on business. And queuing up at the JFK check-in counter or at the boarding gate, there would be, in order with no particular precedence: a two-plus-two nuclear family (screaming infants), a little old lady, an attractive girl with a Bloomingdale’s shopping bag and a ginormous middle-aged man in a checked, short-sleeved shirt, a man giving a new meaning to the word obesity, whose generous girth might straddle two aeroplane seats. And you’re praying, “Please God, please let me sit next to the attractive girl with the Bloomingdale’s shopping bag and not that awful man, the little old lady or the nuclear family” — and of course, inevitably, you then spend the entire flight discovering a new skill as a contortionist, squeezed up to the talkative, expansive Dwight from Minnesota, a travelling salesman in chafing powder, who’s only too happy to fill you in on the intricate details of his recent operation for hives. Well, Caught on a Train (1980) has this in spades. People forced together in the confines of a small space. Yet travelling on entirely different journeys. Like railway stations, airports, business parks and motorway service stations, it’s really transient — like a dystopian novel by J. G. Ballard.
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