Runaway Train

(Andrei Konchalovsky, USA, 1985)

The global career of Russian director Andrei Konchalovsky has raged high and plummeted low – many times over – but this wonderful, exciting film gets my vote as his absolute best.

From his debut feature, the striking The First Teacher (1965) shot in what is now Kyrgyzstan, one lightning-fast sequence of detailed gestures stays in the mind for eternity. A young adult teacher is crossing a stream with a female student (herself no longer a child); she suddenly develops a painful leg cramp. Back on solid ground, he warms up her leg with his hand … which then strays, for a split second, to a more intimate spot. She instantly, forcefully pushes him away, and he topples over, ashamed and embarrassed. But he also surreptitiously raises his fingers to his nose for a quick smell of that sweet odour that is swiftly vanishing from his skin … Such corporeal cinema!

Two decades later, Konchalovsky is in the USA. It’s his gamely overheated, melodramatic era, often premised on sexual hysteria: Maria’s Lovers (1984), Shy People (1987), followed by the Russian/Italian US co-production The Inner Circle (1991) … After that, it’s (more or less) back to the homeland, making more films, receiving lifetime-achievement accolades, and getting publicly involved with the twists and turns of Soviet politics, from Pussy Riot to Putin …

Back to 1985 – and the production-distribution largesse of Cannon/Golan-Globus. Can an action-oriented filmmaker go wrong with a train in motion? Not if they’re Penn or Frankenheimer, Skolimowski or Robbe-Grillet, Hitchcock or Keaton, Aldrich or De Palma … Even comedies, from Lubitsch to Rozier, benefit greatly from this setting. And don’t forget the excellent episodic film Tickets (2005) by Kiarostami, Olimi and Loach!

Konchalovsky, for his part, gives definitive expression to the train as the embodiment of masculine energy run amok.

Runaway Train was originally a mid-1960s project of Akira Kurosawa, reworked 20 years later by an intriguing tag team including family-tormented playwright Paul Zindel (The Effect of Gamma Rays on Man-in-the-Moon Marigolds) and hardboiled crime novelist Edward Bunker (Animal Factory, Dog Eat Dog).

Beginning as a grimily realistic prison movie (Bunker’s specialty), it becomes a riveting tale of three men (Jon Voight as Manny, Eric Roberts as Buck and John P. Ryan as Ranken) locked in a (literally) shifting drama of alliance and combat. Their train is roaring through a snowy countryside, and the authorities are trying (somewhat in vain) to halt it.

Another all-male inferno, you say? In fact, the way in which the film introduces a woman (Rebecca DeMornay as Sara) half-way through proceedings is especially ingenious.

Although it works itself up – like many a Konchalovsky film – to some grandiose statements about the Human Condition, Runaway Train manages to remain a compellingly physical drama from start to end. And, in that, a superb, precise tribute to the legacy of Kurosawa.

MORE Konchalovsky: Tango & Cash, Lumière and Company

© Adrian Martin 6 July 1990 / 5 September 2024