“HEY, MANNY!”

By Raymond Benson

One of the generally underrated and mostly forgotten great action thrillers of the 1980s was Runaway Train, a sleeper that took audiences by surprise in late 1985/early 1986. Produced by the low-rent team of Menahem Golan and Yoram Globus for the now-defunct Cannon Films, Train was not the partners’ ordinary B-movie action fare. The picture’s pedigree assured that there was going to be something interesting within, and there was.

Runaway Train was originally an Akira Kurosawa project. The Japanese director had conceived the movie, co-written a screenplay with two of his regular colleagues, and planned to make it in conjunction with a Hollywood studio in the late 1960s. According to the supplements on Kino Lorber’s new Blu-ray release of the film, Kurosawa wanted to cast Henry Fonda and Peter Falk in the lead roles of escaped convicts aboard an out-of-control train speeding to its oblivion. Unfortunately, weather and financial hurdles caused the production to fail, so Kurosawa went on to work on Tora, Tora, Tora!, only to be replaced by Kinji Fukasaku and Toshio Masuda on that production when Kurosawa fell behind schedule and went over-budget.

Enter Golan-Globus. They secured the rights to the screenplay in the early 1980s and had it revised by Paul Zindel and Edward Bunker. With Russian director Andrei Konchalovsky hired to helm the picture, Djordje Millicevic came in to do more work on the script. The casting of Jon Voight and Eric Roberts, though, elevated the project to near-A-list caliber. The result is a breathtaking, armrest-gripping experience. Both leads were nominated for Academy Awards (Best Actor and Best Supporting Actor, respectively), and the film received a deserved Editing nomination. At the time, the performances by Voight and Roberts were perceived by some as “over the top.” Nonsense. Runaway Train can be listed on the two actors’ resumes as among the best work either of them ever did. (Voight did win a Golden Globe for his performance.)

Manny (Voight) is the most notorious inmate of Alaska’s Stonehaven Maximum Security Prison. He’s been in solitary for three years, and he’s a thorn in the side of Warden Ranken (John P. Ryan). When he’s finally released from solitary, Voight makes his escape with the help of Buck (Roberts), who tags along with Manny as they run through the freezing cold wasteland with the warden and guards in pursuit. Eventually, they secretly board a train—but the lone engineer suffers a heart attack and dies before he can shut down the engine. The only other person aboard besides the two convicts is a feisty train hostler named Sara (Rebecca DeMornay). Meanwhile, the railroad employees at the control center (Kyle T. Heffner, Kenneth McMillan, and T. K. Carter) have to figure out how to stop the train before it causes a disaster. The movie then becomes a chase, a doomsday scenario, and a conflict of wills between man, nature, and machinery.

One can see how the movie grew from a simple premise into this obstacle course of a feature. The train can’t be diverted to that line because it’s near a nuclear power plant! No, not that way, there’s a bridge that will collapse if a train barrels over it at that speed! Uh oh, that track leads head on with a freight train moving in its direction! The possibilities for set pieces were endless, and the writers knew it.

As for the performances… Jon Voight is made up to be a Frankenstein monster of sorts with scars, gold teeth, and a half-shut eye. The actor gives the character—a truly despicable and vicious villain—everything he has, and it’s fabulous. Eric Roberts’ Buck is the brawn, but he’s short on brains. He, too, chews the scenery with aplomb, annoyingly calling out, “Hey, Manny! Hey, Manny!” throughout the picture. It’s appropriate, though, and this is easily the actor’s best work since The Pope of Greenwich Village. The thing is—these “over the top” characterizations are in tune with the outlandishness of the movie itself. The entire production is dynamite.

Kino Lorber’s new Blu-ray restoration looks superb. It comes with an audio commentary with Roberts and film historians David Del Valle and C. Courtney Joyner. The only supplement is a “Trailers from Hell” episode on the picture featuring Rod Lurie, plus theatrical trailers for this and other Kino Lorber releases.

Runaway Train is an unsung masterpiece of gritty 1980s independent filmmaking, and it’s worth a revisit for those of you who may have elapsed memories of it, and it’s an enthusiastic recommendation for those of you who have never been on the ride.

CLICK HERE TO ORDER FROM AMAZON