Found it.
It’s The Incident from 1967.
I had to go through a bunch of actors (DeNiro, no, Pacino, no, Hackman, no, Caan, no) and I just remembered one of the hoods was Martin Sheen. Beau Bridges was in it, too. It’s basically a couple of toughs terrorizing the passengers and as I remember it it all takes place in a single car.
Night Mail Not a feature film but a pioneering documentary made in 1936 . With words by W H Auden and music by Benjamin Britten. Contains the famous poem
“This is the Night Mail crossing the border
carrying the cheque and the postal order…”
This was directed by the master of early documentaries John Grierson.
"They’re all GREEN!" and “Gesundheit!” stick in my head from Pelham
[Quote]
There’s also Atomic Train with Rob Lowe (complete with nuclear blast!) and the last part of Broken Arrow, with a nuke (but alas, no blast, although there was one earlier).[/Mack]
Speaking as an ex-railroader, Atomic Train has some of the most astonishingly stupid depictions of railroad operating practices I’ve ever seen. IIRC, one of the plot points hinges on the throttle of a diesel-electric locomotive becoming “stuck” (a complete impossibility), with no one apparently able to figure where the fuel cutoff switch is. Later on, there’s a scene where some of the characters are standing around on the platform of a caboose debating how to stop the train. Clearly visible in the shot is the handbrake wheel. Hi-larious.
• Indiscretion of an American Wife (1954), starring Jennifer Jones and Montgomery Clift, takes places entirely at the Rome train station.
• Terror on a Train (1953), starring Glenn Ford, is a thriller that takes place entirely on a train.
• The Buster Keaton comedy The General (1927) and the Disney feature The Great Locomotive Chase (1956) are both based on the same Civil War incident in which a band of Union raiders hijacked a Confederate train.
• The Palm Beach Story (1942) has a hilarious sequence on with an inebriated hunting club on a train with Claudette Colbert.
• Who can forget Jack Lemmon in drag sharing a sleeping berth with Marilyn Monroe in Some Like It Hot (1959)?
Hmm… could be a good premise. Tokyo-Osaka is about 2 hours 30 minutes, you could set a real-time thrilller in that frame.
A few movies have used them for short scenes (Christopher Lambert’s The Hunted has a long swordfight in one, while Kurosawa’s Heaven and Hell uses them as a plot point. And it’s only one scene and with a regular commuter train, but the opening to Jisatsu Saakuru (Suicide Club) is pretty unforgettable.)
Actually, doing a search on the imdb for ‘train’ and ‘japan’ brought up a couple. Shinkansen Daibakuha: “Criminals plant a bomb on a high-speed train. It will explode when the train slows down, unless a ransom is paid.” Gee, that sounds familiar, but this one’s from 1975.
While it’s not a “train movie” per se, in one movie the trains did symbolize one side of a conflict’s power, resolve, and also served to provide them with a decided advantage and launched a dramatic entrance.
That would be the payroll and subsequent posse trains in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.
Who can forget ‘Ostre sledované vlaky’?!
The first Mission: Impossible movie has a completely unrealistic but exciting sequence involving a helicopter and one of the superfast French trains.
Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid rob numerous trains, but use a bit too much dynamite on the bank car of one.
The exuberantly silly and unhistorical Wild Wild West movie with Will Smith prominently features a train with all sorts of cool features, and a good train chase.
The disappointing second Zorro movie with Antonio Banderas nevertheless has an exciting train sequence near the end.
And who could forget the Hogwarts Express, featured in several Harry Potter movies?
I’ve seen that; I got it from one of those little tiny fly-by-night video outfits. It was wonderful. Only about twenty or thirty minutes, as I recall.
I actually at first didn’t believe it was Eric Roberts.
I didn’t know this guy could act at all, but in that part he is totally convincing.
And Jon Voight plays one of the creepiest badasses ever.
This is the full text of the poem
To fully appreciate it you should the imagine the different tempos of the train as it speeds towards its destination.
[spoiler]I can hold my tongue no longer. Silver Streak rocks. And if George hadn’t gotten thrown off the train (“Son of a bitch!”) he never would have met Grover T. Muldoon.
It has some flaws. Hard to believe the FBI would bring a book editor to a shootout, for example. But Richard Pryor and Gene Wilder worked together a few more times and it was never as good as the first.[/spoiler]
Trains give Yurii time to reflect, show the plight of the Russian peasants, introduce us to dissident Amourski and, later, leader Strelnikov in Dr. Zhivago.
Nevertheless, it was great fun to see the 20th Century Limited along the famous Water Level Route (now the Metro-North Hudson Line, which I ride several times a week). I actually recognized a red brick factory or two.
The Greatest Show on Earth is an entertaining circus movie and a lot of it takes place on the circus train. And at the end, there’s a fantastic circus train crash! It’s worth watching for the end alone.