Waitin' For The Evening Train

Starting in approximately 1760, the Industrial Revolution helped entrepreneurs develop production lines where the standardization of parts and labor could deliver the goods faster, better, and with more uniform results. Today, as many people fret about their jobs being eliminated due to automation, it's important to look back on how the Industrial Revolution paved the way for something we now take for granted: mass transit.

Long before December 17, 1903 (when the Wright Brothers made their first successful flights at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina) or Henry Ford's introduction of the Model T Ford on October 1, 1908, steam-powered transportation had made a profound impact on travel.

Built in 1807, the North River Steamboat (better known as the Clermont), was hailed as "the world's first vessel to demonstrate the viability of using steam propulsion for commercial water transportation." Launched on February 5, 1840, RMS Britannia featured two paddle wheels and could transport 115 passengers across the Atlantic Ocean while relying on its 82 crew members (maritime historians regard the Britannia as the first steam-powered ocean liner). According to Wikipedia:

"Richard Trevithick built the first steam locomotive in 1802. The first commercially successful steam locomotive was built in 1812-13 by John Blenkinsop. Locomotion No. 1, built by George Stephenson and his son Robert's company, Robert Stephenson and Company, was the first steam locomotive to haul passengers on a public railway, the Stockton and Darlington Railway in 1825. In 1830 George Stephenson opened the first public inter-city railway, the Liverpool and Manchester Railway. Robert Stephenson and Company was the pre-eminent builder of steam locomotives for railways in the United Kingdom, the United States, and much of Europe in the first decades of steam.

Last month, on May 10th, railroad enthusiasts and media outlets celebrated the 150th anniversary of the day the "last spike" was pounded into position at Promontory Summit in the territory of Utah. When one remembers that there were no computers available in 1869, the unification of the Central Pacific and Union Pacific railroads to form the First Transcontinental Railroad should be seen as a magnificent achievement in imagination, engineering, and human labor.


From American railroad legends like the Super Chief, California Zephyr, and 20th Century Limited to the Trans Siberian Express, Flying Scotsman, and Maharajas' Express, train travel has held a special place in the hearts of many travelers.

• Agatha Christie used one of the world's most famous trains as the setting for Murder on the Orient Express.
• The 20th Century Limited became the setting for Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur's 1932 play Twentieth Century (which was inspired by Charles Bruce Millholland's tales of working for producer David Belasco). In 1934, the Broadway play was adapted for the silver screen by Howard Hawks, with a cast starring John Barrymore and Carole Lombard. In 1978, a Broadway musical based on the beloved film, with book and lyrics by Adolph Green and Betty Comden and music by Cy Coleman (starring John Cullum, Madeline Kahn, and Imogene Coca) opened at the St. James Theatre. On The Twentieth Century ran for 449 performances and won five Tony Awards.

The motion picture industry embraced train travel with open arms. In movie musicals such as 1941's Sun Valley Serenade, 1946's The Harvey Girls, and the film adaptation of 1957's Broadway hit, The Music Man, trains did a splendid job of sprucing up a location shoot or showing off a songwriter's talent with a "novelty number."






During the silent film era trains first captured the imagination of filmmakers. From the thrilling steam locomotive chase in 1915's The Hazards of Helen to Buster Keaton's most spectacular sequence from 1927's The General and his sly stunt in 1931's Parlor Bedroom and Bath, trains proved to be invaluable props. However, in those days, there was no such thing as computer-generated imagery. Just as Norma Desmond claimed that "We didn't need dialogue, we had faces," filmmakers used real trains in their stunts (and many famous actors performed their own stunts).

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One of the most eagerly awaited screenings at the 2019 San Francisco Silent Film Festival was 1924's The Signal Tower, a film by Clarence Brown which builds dramatic tension as well as any modern thriller. Set along the Fort Bragg railroad line in the redwood forest near Mendocino, the film focuses on signal towerman Dave Tayor (Rockliffe Fellowes) who, together with his wife, Sally (Virginia Valli) and young boy, Sonny (Frankie Darro), lives in a cabin in the woods so close to the railroad tracks that he can walk to work.

Rockliffe Fellowes (Dave), Virginia Valli (Sally), and
Frankie Darro (Sonny) are the Taylor family whose happiness
is at stake in 1924's The Signal Tower

After many years spent working for the railroad, Dave's devoted fellow employee, Old Bill (James O. Barrows), retires. His replacement turns out to be the surly Joe Standish (Wallace Beery), a strange man who seems a lot less interested in his job than in breaking workplace rules and manipulating people for his own amusement. Standish is the kind of villain whose snake-like charm occasionally covers for his predatory instincts.

Poster art for 1924's The Signal Tower

“The Signal Tower was a railroad drama made by a man who loved railroads," notes film historian Kevin Brownlow. "A former auto engineer and future director of Greta Garbo, Brown had been an assistant to the great pictorialist, Maurice Tourneur. He had a stronger sense of drama than his mentor, and this story of a tower signalman and his family on a lonely mountain railroad is a model of rising dramatic intensity. In this film he displays a similar feeling for light, composition, and atmosphere.”

In his program note, Brownlow describes how, in 1965, Clarence Brown told him that:

“We took over a railroad in northern California and worked among the big trees for six weeks. They had one train a day. Once we let that through, it was our set. I had a terrific wreck in the picture, when the train broke loose at the top of the mountain and came down wide open. The whole railroad was ours. We used to get up at 5 a.m. and shoot the locomotive climbing the gradient with the sun coming up and the steam mingling with the trees. It was just beautiful, Ben Reynolds (who had recently photographed Greed for von Stroheim) was my cameraman. He made everything on location, even the interiors of the signal tower, which I had built at a switch track. When it got too bright outside, we fitted amber glass in the windows to balance the exposure."

Virginia Valli (Sally Taylor) and Rockliffe Fellowes (as her
husband, Dave) in a scene from 1924's The Signal Tower

In Brown's riveting silent film, the intertitles are cleverly illustrated with a railroad signal so that, at key moments in the developing drama, the signal moves from Safety to Warning and then to Danger. The restoration of The Signal Tower by SFSFF was done in coordination with Photoplay Productions. As the nonprofit's board president, Robert Byrne, explains:

“Only two 16mm copies of The Signal Tower survive: a tinted copy created in 1928 in the collection of Kevin Brownlow and Patrick Stanbury’s Photoplay Productions and a preservation duplicate of a 16mm copy at the Packard Humanities Institute. These two sources were scanned at 4K resolution then digitally repaired in accordance with the ethical guidelines of the International Federation of Film Archives (FIAF). Then, two new 35mm black-and-white negatives were made, and from those, two new 35mm prints, which were then dye-tinted by specialist chemists in Prague to identically reproduce the colors of the original dye-tinted 16mm source.”

Virginia Valli (Sally) tries to fend off the unwanted
advances of Joe Standish (Wallace Beery)
in a scene from 1924's The Signal Tower

With musical accompaniment by pianist Stephen Horne and percussionist Frank Bockius, the tension started to build early in the film's screening with Bockius doing a splendid job of mimicking a train's rhythm on drums. By the time the dramatic tension built between Sally and Standish, there was a much bigger crisis for the audience to witness. One train didn't have enough power to make it over a hill and, as a result, started to retrace its path (which could lead to a calamitous collision with another passenger train several miles away). When Sonny breaks free and runs to alert his father, all hell breaks loose as they struggle (during a drenching downpour) to prevent a major catastrophe from happening.

Rockliffe Fellowes (Dave) holds his son (Frankie Darro)
in a tense moment from 1924's The Signal Tower

It's not often that a talented percussionist can add a hugely important element to a film, but Bockius deserves special credit for his thrilling contribution to the screening. Although the following clip of The Signal Tower may be frayed in some places, it allows viewers to enjoy the expert tinting and thrilling footage of trains making their way through a redwood forest in Northern California. The film also includes two wonderful performances in small roles (Dot Farley as Sally's flirtatious cousin Gertie and J. Farrell MacDonald as Pete, a railroad engineer who befriends Dave's young son). If you've got eagle eyes, you might spot the director, Clarence Brown, making a cameo appearance as a desperate railroad switchman during the film's climactic storm scene.

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Just as trains inspired travelers, the need to build large terminals to accommodate so many rail passengers led to such architectural landmarks as Manhattan's Grand Central Station and Washington, D.C.'s Union Station. Railway stations in major cities have undergone major restoration projects to restore their economic power by transforming them into hotels (Nashville, St. Louis, Chattanooga), shopping malls (Sacramento, Antwerp, Madrid), and living spaces (Cincinnati, Montreal). To see what some of the world's famous railway stations look like today, check out the link in this sentence.

Many railway stations, however, were not designed to be architectural wonders. Instead, they were work-a-day buildings next to a parking lot that serviced local commuters. The bulk of Guest Artist (a new indie film written by Jeff Daniels and directed by Timothy Busfield) takes place at night in and around such a railway station as its creative team lavishes a very special kind of love on the location. Daniels stars as Joseph Harris, a broke and broken playwright of renown whose career has come to a crashing halt and who now looks at life through the bleariest of eyes.

Jeff Daniels plays an alcoholic playwright in Guest Artist

As the film begins, the viewer sees Harris leaving a bar and walking through Manhattan's theatre district en route to a meeting with his agent, Helen (Erika Slezak). As they commiserate over life's little cruelties, Helen reminds Joseph that he's got a contract to be a playwright in residence at a small suburban theatre company which plans to present his next play as part of their upcoming season. Though her client is in no shape to go anywhere outside of his comfort zone, Helen hands him a train ticket and tells him to get with the program if he ever wants another favor from her.

Drunk as a skunk by the time he arrives at his destination, Harris is surprised that no one is at the train station to meet him. That's because Kenneth Waters (Thomas Macias), the young man assigned to the task who worships the playwright, forgot that Harris was arriving that night.

Jeff Daniels and Thomas Macias in a scene from Guest Artist

Other than the scenes in which a train whooshes past the station without stopping, this is a very intimate little film that has obviously been made as a labor of love. At this point in his life Joseph Harris is a man who has lost hope and been reduced to a jaded shell of a man whose only motivation is finding his next drink. Young Kenneth is the exact opposite: infatuated with the magic of theatre, lacking confidence in his writing, and totally unschooled in the handling of a curmudgeonly alcoholic.

Thomas Macias co-stars as Kenneth Waters in Guest Artist

If much of Guest Artist seems like a play rather than a movie, that's because of how the project evolved. Daniels adapted a play he had written that was originally staged in 2006 by the Purple Rose Theater Company (which the actor founded in 1991 in his hometown of Chelsea, Michigan). "We just kinda took the attitude of ‘Let’s shoot it as a film but not apologize for the fact that it’s still a play' and hope the audience can stay interested because there isn’t a car chase every 20 pages," he recalls.

Jeff Daniels and Thomas Macias in a scene from Guest Artist

As Daniels (who is currently starring as Atticus Finch in the Broadway production of To Kill a Mockingbird) further explains:

"Back in the 1970s, Lanford Wilson was a friend of mine and Tim’s at Circle Repertory Company and a mentor. He ended up becoming a Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright and, after about eight years or so of my theater company being in existence, I invited him out, and paid him (on a commission) to write a play for our company, which was a big ask because the guy’s got a Pulitzer. He’s finished writing, he doesn’t want to write anymore, and I’m trying to jump-start my theater company with someone of his caliber. I had to drive down to the Toledo train station and pick him up at six in the morning when his train got in from New York."

Poster art for Guest Artist

"He came off the train and, you know, he wasn’t drunk, but he did drink. We’d given him six months to write something, and he calls and says, ‘I don’t have anything. I’m sorry. I can give you the money back if you want.’ I said, ‘No, come out. See what we do, and let’s talk about it.’ Having worked with him decades before, I thought we were ready at the time to handle it. To see him come off that train and he hasn’t written a word -- that’s what the play was based on. I replaced [myself in the story] with an apprentice, and we made some plot changes to make it a little more dramatic. We did one of his early plays, The Hot l Baltimore (1973), for him. He saw that, went back to New York, and wrote a play called Book of Days which ended up winning the ATCA New Play Award at the Humana Festival in 1998. During the second play that we had commissioned for him, he quit drinking (which was terrific)."

In addition to Thomas Macias (who gives an impassioned performance as the young Kenneth Walters), supporting roles in the film have been given to local actors from the Purple Rose Theatre Company. Richard McWilliams shines as Franz, the disgruntled station master who takes no pleasure in giving shelter to an angry drunk on a cold, wintry night. McKara Bechler has a nice cameo as Kenneth's high school crush. Late in the film, Ruth Crawford has a beautiful scene as Mary, an elderly woman taking a train out of town to visit her dying sister.

Guest Artist will have strong appeal to theatre people as well as those who have had a chance to meet their idol and be severely disappointed by the experience. Nevertheless, the film is a beautiful showcase for Daniels and Macias which, at curious moments, invokes memories of some of the outdoor scenes in Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? Here's the trailer: