Movie Reviews for Riding the Rails

Riding the Rails

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Movie Reviews of Riding the Rails

Movie Review: DEPRESSION-ERA
Summary: 5 Stars

Little known film documenting the '30s, interesting footage and current updates. Wonderful human interest, amazing pro-union input: needed today.

Movie Review: Great of Teenagers
Summary: 5 Stars

I am a history teacher and showed this movie to my students and they really enjoyed it. It talked about childern their age (15).

Movie Review: Starlight On The Rails
Summary: 4 Stars

Growing up in the 1950's I had a somewhat tenuous connection with trains. My grandparents lived close to a commuter rail that before my teenage years went out of service, due to the decline of ridership as the goal of two (or three) car garages gripped the American imagination in an age when gas was cheap and plentiful. In my teens though, many a time I walked those above-mentioned abandoned tracks to take the short route to the center of town. As an adult I have frequently ridden the rails, including a cross-continental trip that actually converted me to the virtues of air travel. Of course, my `adventures' riding the rails is quite different than that being looked at in this American Experience documentary about a very, very common way for the youth of America to travel in the Depression-ridden 1930's, the youth of my parents' generation. My own experiences were merely as a paying passenger. Theirs was anything but. The only common thread between them and me is the desire expressed by many interviewees to not be HERE but to be THERE.

This tale of a significant number of youth in the 1930's is held together by film footage of the time, some nice background music from the likes of Jimmy Rodgers and Doc Watson that evokes the `romance of the rails' and `talking head' interviews with the itinerant travelers, male and female. Despite various motives from the desire to leave their parents' houses to being thrown out during those tough times the stories they tell are of cold nights in open box cars, overcrowded jails, beatings by the ever present railroad "bulls" and looking for a little work to move on to the next locale and maybe some `peace'. Mainly this was the eternal heading West of the Frederick Turner Jackson thesis- with this proviso- by then the land had run out and maybe the possibility of the dreams. A few interviewed are still driven by the lore of the rails, many had no regrets but mainly this is a very interesting trip down memory lane in a time before the automobile became readily accessible to teenagers.

No review of the life of the rails can omit the special jargon developed by those on the road, the `class' distinctions (hobo, bum, and tramp) between them and the rough and ready `code of honor' of the rails (honored more in the breach than in the practice from what I can gather). This tradition has survived best in song by the likes of Woody Guthrie in any number of his songs written in the 1930's, the classic Elizabeth Cotton song Freight Train and the work, including a song with the same title as the headline to this piece, of the recently deceased old Wobblie, folksinger, writer and rail rat extraordinaire Utah Phillips. Starlight On The Rails, indeed!.

Movie Review: REAL history
Summary: 4 Stars

Truthfully, I EXPECTED less. After some of the reviews, I thought I might be setting myself up for disappointment. NOT SO- I love first hand accounts, history from people who have lived thru the experiance. Having lived by railroad tracks most of my life, I often fantisized about the adventure. I would recomend this selection.