Over the years CFS has shown several films perhaps unfairly labeled as the “serious pictures” from the Cannon Group catalog: Jean-Luc Godard’s King Lear, John Cassavetes’s Love Streams, and Andrei Konchalovsky’s Shy People — and we could not in good conscience leave out Runaway Train. Adapted from an original screenplay by Akira Kurosawa, Runaway Train opens in a remote prison in Alaska where the release of well-respected convict and repeat escapee Manny (Jon Voight) from solitary confinement triggers a prison riot. Amid the chaos, Manny escapes again, this time with a tagalong: a young inmate played with rabid puppy energy by Eric Roberts. (To date Roberts has racked up over 700 roles, but he’s truly a sight to behold in the 1980s.) The two men take shelter in an empty locomotive, and when the engineer unexpectedly drops dead they find themselves hurtling through the Alaskan wilderness in an unmanned train with busted brakes, with a sadistic warden who refers to them as “pieces of human waste” hot on their trail. As an action film, it does extraordinary work, offering CGI-free stunts of mind-boggling skill and beauty — trains crashing into trains, people dangling from helicopters, Rebecca De Mornay walking on top of a speeding locomotive — but its work in the philosophical and emotional realm is just as memorable. This is not a film to watch at home, it’s a film to be seen big and loud and bright, to be enveloped and pummeled by. It’s a film that left even Roger Ebert speechless (at least for a moment): “The ending of the movie is astonishing in its emotional impact. I will not describe it.” 

Preceded by: Popeye in “Onion Pacific” (Dave Fleischer, 1940) – 6 min – 16mm