Silver Streak

George Caldwell (Gene Wilder) is a book editor who takes the train from Los Angeles to Chicago for two days of rest, and Silver Streak is 114 minutes of him not getting it. Colin Higgins’s script follows the Hitchcock pattern: a mild man, a woman in the next compartment, a body glimpsed and then denied, villains in good suits. Arthur Hiller directs it as a roomy entertainment in no hurry to arrive. It is a decent evening, warmer than most of the reviews allow, and it takes an hour to earn that.

Wilder is playing it quiet, a courteous man who cannot quite believe his luck. He flirts with Hilly Burns (Jill Clayburgh) over a drink, listens to Bob Sweet (Ned Beatty) talk, and goes to bed; in the night a dead man slides past the window, and in the morning everyone tells him he imagined it. Clayburgh is relaxed and dry, and the scenes in her compartment have a grown-up ease the film never quite gets back to. Beatty talks as if silence frightened him.

The trouble with the first half is that nothing in it is urgent. Higgins’s plot is a loop: George is put off the train, finds a way back on and is put off again, and David Bretherton cuts each excursion at the same easy pace. Henry Mancini’s main theme is bright brass and strings that sound like a holiday advertisement, and it plays under scenes about a man who thinks he is going to be killed. We were restless by the fortieth minute and we checked the time, which no thriller should allow.

Then Richard Pryor gets in the car. Grover Muldoon is a thief who steals the vehicle George happens to be sitting in, and from the moment he looks across at this twitching white man in a ruined suit the film has a pulse. Pryor is fast and Wilder is slow, and Higgins is sensible enough to let that be the joke rather than write jokes on top of it. This was the first time the two were paired on screen, and you can see why it stuck. We laughed at them properly, the kind of laugh that is partly relief, and we stopped checking the time.

One scene has to be mentioned. To get George past the police at a station, Grover puts him in shoe polish and a cap and sends him across the concourse carrying a radio. We winced, and then we laughed, and the laugh belonged entirely to Pryor, who watches the attempt with professional disappointment. The scene is about how bad George is at it, and that is the only reading that lets it survive. Many viewers will find it hard to sit through, and we would not argue with them.

Patrick McGoohan plays the villain, Roger Devereau, an art dealer whose interest in Professor Schreiner is not scholarly, and his stillness makes everyone else look nervous. Clifton James turns up as a sheriff who takes his time over every syllable. David M. Walsh shoots the train from the air, a silver line across brown plains, and a night sequence on the roof, with the wind nearly taking George off it, is the one stretch of the first hour where the pictures do the work. Alfred Sweeney’s carriages are wide and panelled, and the bar looks like somewhere you could spend two days.

The last reel we will not describe, except that it is bigger than anything before it, that Hiller stages it straight, and that it works. Hiller had made Love Story and Higgins had written Harold and Maude, neither of them a chase, and the first hour here shows it. What they have built is the shape of a Hitchcock thriller with the dread left out, and once he arrives Pryor carries it.

Most critics disagree with us. Three of the five reviews we have read find it sluggish or worse; one is warm. They are right about the first hour and wrong about the whole: the film they describe stops existing when Pryor gets on, and the second half is paced and played like a different and better picture. Watch it at home, where a slow start costs less, and do not give up at the forty-minute mark.