WARNING: SPOILERS

I saw “Silver Streak” when it was first released in 1976—actually spring 1977, since I saw it at the second-run Boulevard Theater in South Minneapolis—and I remember liking it but wondering when Richard Pryor would show up. Wasn’t he the co-star? It takes like an hour. 

I watched it again with my wife after we’d watched “Remembering Gene Wilder.” Beforehand, I was incensed that it had such a low IMDb score: 6.8? C’mon, kids! Turns out, that’s not just generational. My wife thinks that’s about right. Parts of the movie are painful.

I’m not talking Gene Wilder in blackface, by the way—that’s one of the few instances in Hollywood history (maybe the only one?) where blackface works. No, I’m talking the ’70s swinger vibe. I remembered Ned Beatty coming onto Clayburgh and getting comedically rebuffed with a drink to the pants, but I’d forgotten that Clayburgh then comes onto Wilder in a similar manner and everyone’s cool with it. Because she’s female and good-looking, and Ned Beatty isn’t and isn’t. The problem with Beatty’s character, it’s implied, is that he just doesn’t know his place.

Thankfully people begin getting murdered.

WGA nom
I still disagree with the rating; I’d go mid 7s. I don’t know if anyone can be as funny as Wilder repeatedly getting thrown off a train—that exasperated, clumsy, expletive-laden stomping. Meanwhile, Pryor is at that stage of his career when he seems incapable of not acting the truth. When they’re taken to the police station after the third fall from the train (Wilder’s third, his first), Pryor, rather than turn left into the station, keeps walking straight. He has to be redirected by the cop. No way that’s in the script. It’ s a nothing moment but I love such nothing moments. He’s so obviously inside the head of his character.

Why are their lines funny and Clayburgh’s aren’t? They improvised. Pryor would go off-script, Wilder would follow in a funny, believable manner, and then Pryor would riff off that. For their good work, screenwriter Colin Higgins got nominated for a WGA. He wound up having a nice run in the director’s chair, too: “Foul Play,” “9 to 5” and “The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas.’ Hit, hit, don’t let the door hit your ass.

So George Caldwell (Wilder) is a book publisher taking the Silver Streak from LA to Chicago for a book convention. Is he afraid of flying? “I just want to be bored,” he says with that sweet Gene Wilder smile. 

On board, George meets vitamin salesman Bob Sweet (Beatty), who tells him “the action” on trains is great: “All that motion makes a girl horny,” he says with a horndog smile. It’s supposed to be awful but he’s not wrong here. Hilly Burns (Clayburgh, with a name amalgamated from the leads in “The Front Page”) certainly isn’t shy with George. It helps that they have adjoining rooms with a door that doesn’t quite latch.

But just when skyrockets are in flight, he sees a dead body out the train window—there and gone in a flash. Hilly tries to dismiss it. Probably an old newspaper, she tells him. You just imagined it, she tells him. Is she trying to calm him or just get back to sex? Next morning, as he’s leafing through a book in her bag, like the good publisher he is, he sees the author photo—her boss, Prof. Schreiner (Stefan Gierasch)—and realizes the dead body was him. Is she worried now? “Why don’t you go down the hall and discuss it with him,” she mumbles before turning over. Apparently we’re at that stage when women in film can be sexually aggressive but zero help otherwise.

In the professor’s compartment, no professor, just goons turning the place upside-down. They’re led by Ray Walston as a Runyonesque gangster with perpetually dangling cigarette, who sics Reace (Richard Kiel), a giant enforcer, on George. I like how disbelieving George is as he’s being manhandled and thrown off the train. This is not a thing people do! He winds up walking the tracks until he spots a farmhouse run by Rita Babtree (Lucille Benson), who keeps calling him “Steve” and gets him to milk her cow for her. “Cut the gas, Steve, you’re a grown man, I'm sure you’ve had some similar experience.” Then she takes him into the nearest town by biplane. Benson is great—one of the many fun supporting actors in this thing. And because they actually beat the Silver Streak to the next town, George jumps back on without talking to the cops.

Rushing to Hilly’s compartment, he finds her with supersuave art dealer Roger Devereau (Patrick McGoohan). No, first, he finds her alone, and they argue. Over whether the professor is actually dead. The awful thing? She knows, yet she still gaslights him. To protect him? No, to protect herself. Later she says this:

They told me they’d killed the professor and that, unless I cooperated, they’d kill me, too. And I thought that I’d go along with them and then you’d get away.

Great plan, lady. 

It's Bob Sweet who lets him know he isn’t crazy. Because Sweet isn’t Sweet; he’s Stevens, a federal agent, who’s been tailing Devereau for two and a half years. (So is the horndog personality his cover or his true personality?) The maguffin of it all is pretty funny. The professor’s “Rembrandt Letters” would reveal that paintings the Art Institute purchased on Devereau’s advice were phonies, which is why the professor was killed. Plus Devereau killed 10 in Germany a few years back for similar reasons. The funny thing: I could never tell if Devereau was guilty of fraud or incompetence. The former makes more sense but I love the idea of the latter. He’s an art dealer who has bad taste and kills anyone who realizes it. 

Investigating, Stevens gets it and George is chased onto the train roof, where he kills Reace with a spear gun, stands, and, bango, is knocked off the train a second time. (It’s the shot from the opening credits of Lee Majors’ “The Fall Guy.”) The good news is he finally finds a sheriff. The bad news is it’s Clifton James, who played dipshit southern sheriffs throughout the decade—from “Live and Let Die” to “Superman II.” An APB has gone out on George for murder, so the Sheriff pulls a gun on him. George takes it back and steals a police car. And out of the backseat, emerges—finally!—Richard Pryor.

Grover Muldoon is a car thief who doesn’t mess with “the big M,” for which George is wanted. But then in another nothing moment, Grover looks at him, really checks him out, and figures he’s harmless. Again, that’s all Pryor.

The blackface scene is brilliant. They need to get back on the train, George’s face is all over the newspapers, so how? It’s Grover who figures it out.

George: I can’t pass for black!
Grover: Who you telling? I didn’t say I was gonna make you black. I said I was gonna get you on the train. We got to make them cops think you’re black.

So shoe polish, a derby, a transistor radio for the ear, and Grover’s purple, shiny “82nd Airborne Division” jacket. The jewfro helps. 

The best part is when he gets into it—when he tries to walk and talk black—it’s just so beautifully unrhythmic and wrong. Think Elaine Benes’ party dance. Tons of white guys tried their “black walk” in the ’70s, including me, based on nothing more than Richard Roundtree in “Shaft” or Huggy Bear on “Starsky and Hutch”; and this is that but so hapless that no white guy should’ve tried it afterwards. (We did.) When Wilder says he doesn't see them getting past the cops, Pryor responds, “We’ll make it past the cops. I just hope we don’t see no Muslims.”

Back on the train, we get the confrontation scene with the villain where he details his plans like in a James Bond movie; it’s Grover, dressed as a waiter, who rescues them. Then another shoot-out, with Pryor and Wilder leaping from the train and into a river. They’re pulled out by the cops—but the feds know what’s going down. Indeed, George is chastised for not figuring out that the APB was a way to bring him in. Which: 1) he’s a book publisher, leave him alone, 2) the newspaper headlines could’ve gotten him killed, and 3) his name is forever besmirched. 

I think he might have a lawsuit.

Outwitting businessmen
Why does Devereau keep fighting after the train is stopped by the feds? His goose is cooked. But I guess that’s what villains do. And why does he have the emergency cords cut? Never got that. But it sets up our big finale—a huge selling point when the movie was released in 1976: a train crashing through Union Station in Chicago. Why doesn’t the train keep going even after the crash? Never got that, either. Did the toolbox get knocked off the gas pedal? Or doesn’t it work if the train isn’t on the tracks? At least it sets up another fun cameo: pre-“Fernwood Tonight” Fred Willard as incompetent middleman who insists a runaway train just isn’t possible.

“Silver Streak” was the fourth-biggest box-office hit of 1976. When Wilder/Pryor reteamed for “Stir Crazy” in 1980, it was the third-biggest box-office hit of the year. Why didn’t they keep going? Make as many as Hope/Crosby? Who knows? Schedules, plans. Pryor was on the way up, Wilder on the way down. Plus tragedies for both: Pryor burned his entire body during a freebasing accident in 1980 and was diagnosed with MS in 1986; Wilder acted as caretaker to his wife, Gilda Radner, who died of cancer before the decade was over. The two men reunited twice more, in 1989 and 1991, but it wasn’t the same. The cultural distance between 1976 and 1989 is forever.

But this is the kind of thing I grew up on, a Jew and a Black guy outwitting a corrupt WASP businessman, and I’d like more of it, please. Doesn’t have to be Blacks and Jews, could be whatever, as long as they’re outwitting corrupt businessmen. We deserve it in the movies since we don’t get it much in life.

April 1977