Transamerica Express

The first film to team legendary funny men Gene Wilder and Richard Pryor, "Silver Streak" is a respectful Hitchcock homage done with much style and humour. It's got thrills, spills, gags, intrigue, and romance. Wittily written by Colin Higgins ("Harold and Maude") and efficiently directed by Arthur Hiller ("Love Story"), it runs pretty long at an hour and 54 minutes but is breezy enough to never *feel* that long. It's got a hell of a good cast to make it all go down very easy.

The ever likable Wilder plays George Caldwell, an ordinary guy book publisher travelling cross country by train. He chances to meet secretary Hilly Burns (an appealing and radiant Jill Clayburgh) and they quickly enter into a steamy liaison. Unfortunately, by doing so, George makes himself vulnerable to the machinations of a smooth villain, Roger Devereau (Patrick McGoohan); soon George is accused of murder. As the story plays out, George is forever getting on and off the train as he works overtime to prove himself innocent and hopefully save Hillys' life.

"Silver Streak" is one of those great films that successfully balances comedic and serious elements. It really comes to life when Pryor shows up (later in the film than you'd expect) as an amiable thief who becomes a willing and helpful sidekick. The comedic highlight comes when he tries to pass Wilder off as a black man. The two stars really shine throughout this whole sequence. They prove to be such a good team that they subsequently got reunited in "Stir Crazy", "See No Evil, Hear No Evil", and "Another You". Wilder makes for an unlikely romantic lead but he and Clayburgh do get some chemistry going.

The supporting cast is full of familiar faces: Ray Walston, Stefan Gierasch, and Richard Kiel (in what is very much a "Jaws" type role, complete with dental work) are McGoohans' henchmen, Ned Beatty is a hearty passenger on the train, Scatman Crothers is the easygoing Ralston, Clifton James plays another one of his patented redneck lawmen, Lucille Benson is the dotty old Rita Babtree, and Fred Willard appears late in the film as the flustered Jerry Jarvis.

Wonderful photography, lovely Canadian locations, and a great old-fashioned kind of score by Henry Mancini are all credits in this superior bit of entertainment, which delivers one hell of an action-packed and destructive finale.

Eight out of 10.

"Silver Streak" was released the very same year the Master of Suspense, Sir Alfred Hitchcock, released his black-comedy swan song, "Family Plot". Though Hitch was in the very twilight of his long, illustrious career, his playful style was alive and well, and well appropriated, in Hollywood. The Master didn't make this movie - Canadian Arthur ("Love Story") Hiller did - but the unmistakable fingerprints and shop-hewn template of Hitchcock's "North By Northwest" (amongst other classics) are in great display thanks to writer Colin ("Foul Play") Higgins in the cheery, breezy action comedy, "Silver Streak".

"Silver Streak" is the first of four Gene Wilder & Richard Pryor match-ups and certainly in retrospect, one of the best. Wilder is an ordinary Joe taking the titular Amtrak train across country. In the midst of his journey, he befriends and beds fellow passenger Jill ("An Unmarried Woman") Clayburgh, ends up witnessing a murder then is wrongly accused of the crime, and is thrown off the train many, many times in his pursuit to clear his name, save the girl from a mysterious villain and get to the other side of the country.

This is a very gentle but funny comedy that plays with the conventions of one of Hitch's favorite themes, the mistaken identity of everyday man in extraordinary circumstances. Wilder is wonderful, fitfully funny as usual and shines as both a romantic lead (!) and does his patented "crazy" guy when things start falling apart. Just watching Wilder's eyes as he exasperatedly tries to explain out the fantastic plot he's wrapped up in to unbelieving characters along the way is one of the film's funniest, simplest rewards.

The film's masterstroke, however, is the addition of Richard Pryor as a part-time thief. Pryor was in the midst of a very hot career in 1976, and although this film seems to restrain some of the imagination and language of his stage presence and TV specials, (this is a PG-rated movie, after all), he still creates an indelible extended 'cameo' that fuses film with a hip, perfectly cool counterbalance to Wilder's mania and confusion. When Pryor is on screen he not only steals the film, but also elevates this old-fashioned adventure-comedy concept to something otherwise original... and you can't take your eyes off the guy.

Filmed all across his native Canada (thanks IMDb for confirming this!), director Hiller pulls this fun little audience-pleasing gem along the rails to a bright and exciting climax. The supporting cast is loaded with wonderful character actors including Patrick MacGoohan, Ray (My Favorite Martian) Walston, Ned Beatty and Scatman Crothers amongst others. A very luxurious and memorable score by Henry Mancini is the capper to this sparkling comedy, perfect as a primer for, and a loving compendium of, many of the Hitchcock classics that wait for you to discover them on DVD, VHS or on the tube.

I saw this film in the cinema as a teenager when it came out. It was sold, I think, as a Hitchcock parody and I thought parodies were great. Gene Wilder was the star, that was one more reason for me to see it, as I had greatly enjoyed his performance in Mel Brooks' Young Frankenstein. Stuff like that attracted me much more than movies with Robert Redford or Charles Bronson who then were the big male heroes of the screen.

Now, a good 30 years later, I watched Silver Streak a second time. It is an unusual mixture of comedy, action thriller and disaster movie. Characters like the ones played by Wilder, Clayburgh or Pryor seem to have become extinct – in the movies, I mean. They just seem to be so ... ordinary and normal and also kind hearted. Everything about Silver Streak is so unpretentious, seeing it today that really was a kind of a revelation to me.

A lot of the movie deals with masculinity and the assertion of it. It all happens in a very relaxed manner. Nothing and nobody is taken too seriously, conquests are made without effort, failure is accepted with grace. In a strange way, this movie really represents a better, unattainable world. I doubt if someone like Gene Wilder wold make it as a movie star today – the public, it seems, needs the grimaces of Jim Carrey to be amused. Pity.

Come to think of it, in France they had a movie comedian who looked very similar to Wilder. His name was Pierre Richard and his fame reached its zenith at about the same time as Wilder's before fizzling out somewhere in the eighties, when the Stallones and Schwarzeneggers took over.

Silver Streak is an entertaining and – in a positive way - forgettable movie. It has a pleasant musical score by Henry Mancini, this great eclecticist of the 20th century. The older I'm getting the more I enjoy his music and respect his enormous body of work.

When I began watching "Silver Streak", I assumed it was a zany comedy. After all, it re-teams Gene Wilder and Richard Pryor. So, imagine my surprise when I found that no comedy at all occurred until Pryor appeared in the film...and this wasn't until over an hour into the movie! Even then, it was still basically a drama with a few comedic scenes. This is NOT a complaint....just trying to adjust your expectations for the film.

George (Wilder) is going cross country by train. Soon after the train leaves, he meets a nice lady, Hilly (Jill Clayburgh) and they REALLY hit it off well....so well they spend the night together in her compartment. But during the night, George thinks he sees a dead man being tossed off the train...but she convinces him he must have imagined it. The next day, it becomes obvious he DID see what he thought....and there's a gang aboard the train that likely will kill him if he keeps digging. At first, they just throw him off the train...and yet again and again George manages to make his way back aboard the train. Along the journey on and off the train, George meets Grover (Pryor) and together they try to solve the crime...a crime now that includes multiple murders!

In many ways, the film plays like a reworking of the plot to "North By Northwest", as an ordinary man gets sucked into all sorts of crazy and life threatening criminal behavior. But as I said above, it's NOT a comedy...at least overall. There are some funny bits (such as the far from politically correct blackface scene...that is pretty funny)....but the film is much more drama than anything else. Overall, a nice and unique film that I do recommend even if it's NOT mostly comedy.

Gene Wilder is the ordinary man caught up in murder and mayhem on the train "Silver Streak" in this 1976 comedy starring Richard Pryor, Jill Clayburgh, Ned Beatty, Ray Walston, and Patrick McGoohan. In a quasi-homage to Hitchcock, Wilder plays George Caldwell, who falls for the lovely Hilly (Jill Clayburgh) and finds himself mixed up in art fraud, missing letters of Rembrandt, and murder. Not only that, he keeps getting thrown off of the train. One of those times, he meets up with a criminal, Grover Muldoon (Pryor) who happens to be in the police car he steals. In the funniest scene in the film, Grover has George buy the cap, shoe polish, sunglasses and radio from a shoe polisher at the train station and makes George a black jiver so he can get by the feds.

There are lots of funny scenes in this film, but the best part of it is the chemistry between Wilder and Pryor, who became a successful screen team. This, however, is their best teaming. The bad guys are great. McGoohan and Walston act as if they're in a heavy duty suspense film, which makes them real and threatening. It works perfectly against the comic aspects of the film.

Hitchcock fans will see this as a mild takeoff on "North by Northwest." It is, but it stands on its own as well.