Tag Archives: trains

An Engagement Waylaid

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And Now For Something Completely Different: A Story Vignette of My Own.

Oliver and I descended the stairs at Market and Montgomery Streets down to the BART station underground. We wandered unfamiliar searching for the ticket machines so we could buy our tickets to Oakland for Stacie and Mark’s engagement party. As we stood at the machines with our dollar bills drooping at the ready, we were suddenly helped, (accosted rather), by two nefarious characters. The first, a young, scraggly 20-something guy who snatched our bills and explained incoherently what to buy and how to buy it as he wildly hit buttons and tapped the screen until our tickets popped out, rather miraculously. Then he pointed out that we should give him two dollars.

We were then left with one ticket of the proper amount for going to and from Oakland and one ticket that had five dollars more than we needed. Inexplicably, the second character popped up: a scraggly, 40-something, rather taciturn yet officious fellow who attempted to help us retrieve some of that extra cash on our ticket but in actuality only succeeded in giving himself two dollars. We do not say no to these people. Thus equipped, we toddled off to our train stop. Once aboard, the rather vacant train whisked us down underwater. A harrowing experience, if you are not used to it, which I never will be, as the old train screeches and scrapes its way through the decades old tunnel at the speed of light, 30-feet below the surface of the bay. At the deepest point, a nerve-crushing sound much like, perhaps, the Death Star scraping through a tight tunnel sent pulsating waves rattling to the core of my soul. I am reminded why I never take BART.

The train emerged above ground in a burst of stark, East Bay sunlight. The worst of the noise ended, and we rattled along on what now seemed rather tottery tracks, high above and over sun-blanched suburbs and empty, industrial buildings. We looked at each other with relief and promptly exchanged overly exuberant jokes in a compulsive fit of jollity. The bright sun moved across the gentrified interior, through the wide, bubbled, scratched windows and across our squinting brows, as the car wavered and turned on its tracks.

Two women sat across from us after the first stop. They could have sat anywhere in the empty compartment, as it  was Saturday and quite uncrowded, but sat across from us and ignored us, putting on their makeup as they chattered-on, their lips and eyes becoming wider and more expressive with each swathe of a pencil-like brush. When the train stopped again, the compartment doors parted with a deep swoosh. We could see through the open doors a brick wall bearing the MacArthur Street sign. “Ours is the next stop,” we agreed. And the doors remained open. We snickered to ourselves at a man who had fallen asleep with his mouth open. And the doors remained open and would not close. We laughed at this, too, in our spectacular ignorance, for this was our stop, in actuality.

However, we unwittingly got off at the wrong stop, the next one, which dropped us in East Oakland where we walked the long and winding way to Stacie and Mark’s place, through dusty neighborhoods that reeked of rancid soy-sauce and stale hamburgers, where the scant population shuffled in ratty clothes and thin-soled shoes, and where a hot wind blew a lone, crusty, fallen leaf down the sidewalk like a shrunken tumbleweed. Once, while peering at the screen of my phone, texting Stacie in the relentless sunshine, a poor soul walked up into my personal space and mumbled something I could not make out. He was too far-gone to incite fear, still, all I could think to say was “sorry,” and he wandered on his way.

The Lady Vanishes on The Night Train to Darjeeling Limited Mashup


Over the weekend I watched Hitchcock’s “The Lady Vanishes” plus “Night Train To Munich,” and both these classic movies seemed to lead to Wes Anderson’s “Darjeeling Limited”. Finding similarities was as fun as trying to spot Alfred Hitchcock’s cameos in his own films, as indeed there is near the end of “The Lady Vanishes”.

Wes Anderson and Owen Wilson are certainly Hitchcock fans and classic movie fans. Aside from the universal traveling-by-train theme, I was constantly delighted with a treasure trove of parallel vignettes. The beginning scenes in both “The Lady Vanishes” and “Darjeeling Limited” for example, take place in hotel rooms: Hitchcock’s zany, old world hotel scenes are a picturesque inkling to Anderson’s film-short, The Hotel Chevalier, the introduction to the main story of “Darjeeling Limited”: a man and woman ending up in the same room and the same bed. Of course, Anderson’s version is much more steamy and therefore quite a bit more exciting; although, Hitchcock’s classic mystery and suspense build up to plenty of thrills, once they’re all on the train,

Margaret Lockwood does resemble Natalie Portman, a bit, who plays Jason Schwartzman’s wild girlfriend in “Darjeelling Limited,” but Lockwood is distinctly British. She plays an alluring role in both of the older films. Lockwood was the quintessential, lovely, English brunette with soulful, penetrating eyes; a hidden weakness for romance and a biting wit. In “Night Train to Munich,” her leading man is Rex Harrison, a dashing and cheeky British Spy. I honestly did not realize that Rex Harrison was ever that young or handsome. The only other film in which I’ve ever seen him was “My Fair Lady,” where he is much older and rather curmudgeonly. But he has the same delightful, British cadences, which crackle like a schoolboy whose voice is changing.

I have yet to see Wes Anderson’s “Grand Budapest Hotel,” but I suspect this latest Anderson creation was also partly inspired by these two older films, with their snowy, foreign vistas and featured train motifs. Also, Anderson often presents us with his fondest actors and actresses time and again. As well, in these two older films, some of the same characters pop up, specifically the two British chaps, Charters and Caldicott. In “Night Train to Munich,” these two exceedingly English gents banter back and forth calling each other “old boy” as they travel together with an indifferent eye toward anything except cricket. They only want to get back to London and not be drawn into anything complicated, until… the Nazis start getting pushy.

The essential difference I see in these films lies in their thematic backdrop. Wes Anderson replaces the old World War tropes with his own signature touch, which is to say with his unique, loving portrayal of the story and its characters. Anderson does away with warfare hostilities and deals mainly in personal relationships, usually within a domestic, suburban setting, at least up to “The Darjeeling Limited,” where he begins to cross borders into ever more exotic lands but retains the essential feeling for the fragility in relationships while tenderly, and humorously, exposing the family dynamic.

The Darjeeling Limited

Night Train To Munich, cover illustration