Romance, Travel: Trains as Prop in the Movies
The American Movie Classics cable channel is offering, tonight at 9, another of its occasional documentaries with film clips arranged around some unifying theme, like great love scenes or New York City settings. The upshot is usually about a yard wide and an inch deep, but the breezy essays constitute a crash course on movies and the images they have embedded in our memories. Our subject this time, class, is the American railroad, chugging rather breathlessly through "All Aboard: Riding the Rails of American Film."
Ever since the very first image was projected on film in 1891, viewers are told, railroads and trains have been a staple of the movies. The first film to discover that, if properly awed, audiences would pay to see it again and again was "The Great Train Robbery" in 1903. Without the trains, of course, there would be no Wild West. As someone notes, the history of this country is largely a history of its rails, documented in a slew of films reaching from John Ford's silent "The Iron Horse" in 1924 to "Union Pacific" in 1939. It's recalled, pointedly, how in those Hollywood days the villains were the robber barons in suits while outlaws became the unlikely heroes.
Trains and even train whistles became irresistible symbols. Fannie Flagg, the author of "Fried Green Tomatoes," in which the young girls throw food from a train to feed the homeless along the tracks, talks about her country upbringing and a time when "the world was very silent, so the train whistle was a kind of wail." Richard Benjamin, the actor and director, speculates on how audiences sense that "that whistle is going to take you into the rest of your life."
The train promises, or threatens, just about everything: confinement and escape, romance and suspense. The latter would have no greater practitioner than Alfred Hitchcock, whose fascination with trains bordered on obsession: "The Lady Vanishes," "The 39 Steps," "Shadow of a Doubt" (with Uncle Charlie's arrival in a cloud of black smoke from the train engine) and "Strangers on a Train." Eva Marie Saint recalls how, when working on "North by Northwest," Hitchcock would give the most basic directions: "Don't use your hands, and don't take your eyes off Cary Grant." Props, including a train, would take care of the rest.
With Jason Robards as narrator, this documentary taps into just about every aspect of movie trains. Spectacular crashes, fantastic escapes, dreams of leaving it all behind and just hopping a freight, the cult of the hobo: all are illustrated with scenes contrived for our entertainment and now tucked forever into our pop-culture baggage. And don't forget the wrenching farewells and joyous reunions on train platforms the world over: "Brief Encounter," "Dr. Zhivago," "Anna Karenina," "Love in the Afternoon." The railroad is described as a grand and magical cinematic stage on which "events, great and small, pass in a blur." Even blurs, evidently, can be memorable. All Aboard! Riding the Rails of American Film AMC, tonight at 9 Written and produced by Jane DeHart. Edited and produced by Marcia Ely.
The Dark Side of Travel Romance
When it comes to the ways of love and romance, no aphrodisiac is quite so potent as travel. On the road — freed from the dull routines and restrictions of home — you become more open, more daring, more willing to seize the moment. Away from home, the people you meet (be they locals or fellow travelers) seem sexier, more exotic, less repressed — and this makes you feel sexy, exotic, liberated. Freed from your past, happily anonymous, and filled with a sense of possibility, you are never more willing (or able) to fall headlong into a love affair. .
The only downside is this: Don't try to rekindle things when you get home. It simply doesn't work. Ever. Regardless of how great you and your lover felt in Rio; regardless of how seamlessly the two of you bonded in Paris; regardless of memories you cherish from Koh Samui, you are only inviting heartbreak if you try to resume the romance in Hackensack or Burbank or Minnetonka.
I used to wonder why this was the case — why, after sharing intense travel experiences, my relationships with the intriguing women I met in Cuzco or Tel Aviv would sour into a series of uninspired e-mails, awkward phone calls and (on occasion) anticlimactic reunions. Why would everything change once we'd stopped traveling?
I finally got a clue to the problem several winters ago in Thailand, when I met a Belgian lass I'll call Katia. Willowy and doe-eyed, with a sexy pout and effortless European grace, Katia would have been out of my league back home — but in the colorful madness of Bangkok, we somehow fell into an easy love affair. Together, we took a train down to Khao Sok National Park in southern Thailand, where we stayed in a tree-house hotel, swam the jungle-rivers, drank Mekhong whiskey, and shared the stories of our lives. After a week, when it came time for Katia to fly back to Brussels, I felt like we had really connected — that our time together had amounted to something special.
Katia must have felt the same way, since — over the course of the next several weeks — she told me how much she missed me, how much she cared for me, and how much our time together had meant to her. When she eventually invited me to join her in Brussels for Christmas, I didn't hesitate: I bought a plane ticket and flew out as soon as I could.
Once I arrived in Brussels, things fell apart almost immediately. When I tried to put my arm around her as we walked to meet her friends at a bar, Katia curtly warned me not to touch her in front of her friends ("They know I'm not sentimental like that," she told me). Once in the bar, Katia continually scolded me: for eating too much; for not sitting up straight; for not asking her friends the right kind of questions. For some reason, I'd suddenly become an embarrassment to Katia — an uncultured American fool who couldn't do anything right
Bringing romance to rail
The architect behind the renovation of the station, a 19th-century masterpiece once threatened with dereliction, is a devotee of railway architecture who's dedicated the past 11 years to returning St Pancras to its former glory.
Designed by the architect William Barlow and completed in 1868, St Pancras was once the largest enclosed space in the world, featuring a breathtaking steel-and-glass train "shed" arching 75m over the railway lines.
The station itself is a red brick Gothic marvel boasting turrets and towers that was completed in 1876 and for nearly 60 years served as one of London's most luxurious hotels.
Since 2001, both station and shed have undergone an £800 million ($NZ2.15 billion) renovation to turn them into a state-of-the-art destination, not just for catching trains, but for high-end dining, shopping, champagne-drinking and living.
"We wanted to create another dimension in travel, to revive the romantic side of the railways," says Lansley as he guides a group of visitors around the beautifully restored "shed", which will officially be opened by the Queen next month and from where the first trains will depart to Paris on November 14.
"If you're travelling to Paris by train, it should evoke images of elegance and romance, and I think we're going to have achieved that."
New high-speed trains will deliver passengers from the station to Paris in just two hours and 15 minutes – the result of a £6 billion, 10-year infrastructure upgrade. It will feature a stylish champagne bar overlooking the platform.
At 93m, that will not only be Europe's longest champagne bar, but it will also offer up to 40 marques of bubbly to tempt tipplers whether waiting for a train or just dropping by for a drink.
A French brasserie, run by Searcy, the company behind highly rated restaurants on top of London's Gherkin and at the Barbican, will offer romantic dining behind the brick archways and sky-blue steel struts that support the glass roof.
Other features that lend a deep sense of history and romance are the vast central clock, an exact replica of the original Dent clock which was damaged while it was being removed to be sold to a collector in the 1970s.
A nine-metre sculpture by artist Paul Day featuring a man and a woman whose heads are touching in an intimate embrace will grace the floor under the clock, forming a natural meeting point for those making a rendezvous at the station.
For Lansley, elegantly dressed in a charcoal suit and white shirt with French cuffs, St Pancras represents the future of rail travel, taking Britain towards the continent.
Royal Road to Romance
The Royal Road to Romance was the first work of the adventurous, horizon chasing romantic, Richard Halliburton. It, essentially, is an account of a Walkabout around the world that he undertook around 1926 and later wrote down in a New Jersey mental institution. It seems evident to me that Halliburton read (and probably reread) Harry Franck’s A Vagabond Journey Around the World and was deeply influenced by it. Everything from Halliburton’s route, his travelling style, to his somewhat unsteady use of vagabond slang echos Harry Franck’s monumental work. But this is not meant as a slight to Halliburton, as any wanderer, myself included, who has read Vagabond Journey has the spirit of the book forever etched into their very psyches. The Royal Road to Romance is completely able to stand on its own two feet, as it takes travel writing into a completely new direction- the direction of Romance.
At the onset of the story, Halliburton explains the impetus behind his journey by reciting Dorian Grey’s ominous warning:
“Realize your youth while you have it. Don’t squander the gold of your days, listening to the tedious, or giving your life away to the ignorant and the common. These are the sickly aims, the false ideals, of our age. “Live ” live the wonderful life that is in you. Be afraid of nothing. There is such a little time that your youth will last- such a little time.”
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