Editor’s Note: Even fans of Alfred Hitchcock movies seem to love Hitchcock parodies like High Anxiety and Foul Play. Freeline Media critic Mike Fried does as well, and has some kind words for another popular Hitch spoof. Read on!
By Mike Fried
THROW MOMMA FROM THE TRAIN
4/5
“A writer writes. Always”
And this is the problem for Larry Donner. He has written a book. But his ex-wife stole it from him and when she publishes it, it becomes a bestseller. He wants to kill her, figuratively. So he is relegated to teaching creative writing at a local community college. And in his class is a wannabe writer named Owen Lift … who wants to kill his mother. Literally.
Owen can’t write and he asks Larry for advice. Larry tells him that he needs to establish an alibi. He tells him to watch Hitchcock. So Owen goes to see Strangers on a Train and he latches onto the “criss cross” scene. Next thing Larry knows is that Owen calls him up from Hawaii telling him that he fulfilled his end of the bargain and now Larry has to kill his mother.
This homage to Hitchcock works so well for a small handful of reasons.
First, Danny DeVito (who also directed) is extraordinarily funny as Owen. He is a simple minded man who enjoys the simple things in life. When their car is careening down through a wooded forest he says “This is like the Flintstones Car Wash.” He takes pleasure in showing Larry his coin collection. The coins aren’t valuable. But they represent a happy time in his life. It is a great turn of character from a loser into someone who could be lovable.
Billy Crystal is equally up to the task bringing his neurotic rage that he does so well. And the two of them play off each other majestically. Larry is a lost soul but in his rage, he has implicated himself in his wife’s murder. “I hate her. I wish she was dead” he screams in front of his students who further implicate him.
But as good as they are, there is no way this movie works without the career best performance of Anne Ramsey as Momma Lift, a performance so good that she earned an Oscar nomination for best supporting actress. She is constantly yelling “Owen” — a cry which I have heard in my mind since I first saw this movie — in a scratchy voice (the sad result of throat cancer and operations she underwent to fix it). And she plays Momma as a thoroughly irascible character who enrages Larry into wanting to kill her. Her funniest line is “Holy shit. What a dream I was having. Louis Armstrong was trying to kill me.” She also does her own stunts hanging off the train, without a stunt double.
The script by Stu Silver and its direction by DeVito are truly an outstanding homage to the Master of Suspense. The pantry scene alone is a wonderful bit of misdirection: Owen realizes that Larry is in the house, hiding in the pantry, and didn’t kill Momma, so he asks the visiting police inquiring about Larry to get him tea and sugar from the same pantry, only to call the cop back at the last minute. When Larry faints in Owen’s house, the camera spins around as it rises. It really is a masterstroke.
And what really seals the deal is that composer David Newman (son of Alfred, cousin of Randy, brother of Thomas) does a miraculous job of creating a Bernard Herrmann like score that is so close to perfection that it enhances the entire film.
It’s a movie that is so damned sultry in here.
WATCH IT!
Michael Fried has no formal training in movies, except having watched over 26,000+ movies — if not more — in his 60-plus years on this planet, starting with Goldfinger as his first cinema experience. He knows what he likes and he knows what he doesn’t like, and it’s quite often different from the conventional wisdom. He knows that the best franchise is Godzilla and he loves action movies and comedies. He has not been nominated for any awards except some boring insurance awards which has no applicability to movies (with the possible exceptions of Billy Wilder’s Double Indemnity and John Cassavettes’ Big Trouble). He is part of a team that won the 1980 SUNY Albany Trivia content by correctly guessing the question, “Who played the president of Klopstockia in Million Dollar Legs?” So he has that going for him, which is nice.
Contact Mike at moviemike3@gmail.com
