Silver Streak (1976) * * * 1/2

Directed by:  Arthur Hiller

Starring:  Gene Wilder, Richard Pryor, Jill Clayburgh, Ray Walston, Patrick McGoohan, Scatman Crothers, Ned Beatty, Richard Kiel, Clifton James

The last person you would ever expect to see holding a gun, running on top of a moving train, and fighting bad guys is Gene Wilder.     Whatever the opposite of an action film star is, Wilder is it.    This makes his casting as the hero in Silver Streak all the more inspired.    Throw Richard Pryor into the mix as the hilarious sidekick and we have a gem from beginning to end.     

George Caldwell (Wilder) boards the Silver Streak train in Los Angeles expecting to take a relaxing trip to Chicago.     He thinks the trip will clear his head, but soon he finds himself meeting the wrong woman at the wrong time and his plans are waylaid.      Silver Streak echoes (and pays homage to) Hitchcock by making George the innocent man wrongly accused.      A man is murdered aboard the train and George is made to be the prime suspect.     He finds himself involved in fights and killings which he is not built for, but he holds his own.     Oh, and he is physically thrown off the train not once, not twice, but three separate times during the movie.     Each time, he uses ingenuity to get back on the train and save Hilly (Clayburgh) from certain death.

During one of the excursions off of the train, George hooks up with a car thief named Grover T. Muldoon (Pryor), who fearlessly evades the cops and hatches a scheme to disguise George as a black man in order to board the train again.     I know what you're thinking...blackface=bad taste.     It's all context, however, and this sequence is very, very funny, mostly because Wilder is the last guy you would expect to pretend to be a black man.      I doubt such a scene could be made today just on principle, but in 1976 such humor wasn't even considered daring.

Wilder and Pryor are a deft comic team which plays off each other very well.     They also make believable action heroes, which is no small feat.     Clayburgh is a sweet, sympathetic damsel in distress, while McGoohan, who plays her devious boss Roger Deverau, hatches a labyrinthine scheme to murder an esteemed professor, put a double in his place, and somehow make millions in the process.    The plot is straight out of Hitchcock and this is not a bad thing.    Htichcock himself may have seen this film and enjoyed it for all I know.

Wilder and Pryor would reteam for three more films:  Stir Crazy (1980), See No Evil, Hear No Evil (1989) and Another You (1991).     The latter two films were made while Pryor was in the early stages of MS and it sapped his energy from the proceedings.     Stir Crazy was a pretty funny movie, but not quite as energetic and uproariously silly as Silver Streak.      Oh, and let's not forget the climactic scene in which the runaway Silver Streak crashes through a Chicago train station in spectacular fashion.     It doesn't seem like anyone was killed miraculously and the gang gets to ride off into the sunset.    I never said Silver Streak was realistic.    I said it was funny and skillfully done, which is all you can ask.