The following piece is a continuation of a series, Behind the Frame by Chris Rogers, which analyzes how the built environment has been represented on the big screen. Interiors will post future pieces on INTJournal.com.

The railway has a special place in the history of cinema. In 1895, an arriving train was the subject of one of the first public projections of a motion picture, startling the audience to such an extent that some felt the locomotive was about to burst out of the screen. Ever since, directors and screenwriters have been repeatedly attracted to the specific filmic architectures of train, platform and station.

The station, in film, is invariably a terminal, and thus both literally and symbolically the beginning or end of a journey. Its architectural majesty suggests this, impressing those arriving or comforting those departing, but cinema has often highlighted how impersonal and uncaring such places can be. In the Texas-set The Getaway, Doc McCoy’s wife has agency in the city but is less astute in a crowded train station, losing her bag and the couple’s fortune to a practised trickster whom her husband must therefore pursue. Repeated cuts to her awaiting Doc’s return emphasize her loneliness in the emptying concourse of the then Sunset Station in San Antonio. Paul Greengrass’s The Bourne Ultimatum and Brian De Palma’s The Untouchables depict an anonymity that can prove fatal. In the first, a coldly mechanical assassination passes almost unnoticed in the quotidian setting of rush-hour at London Waterloo, whilst in the second, an intricate, three-dimensional shoot-out co-opts the Neoclassical glamour of Union Station in Chicago as a stage for mass tragedy.

The generosity of space associated with station architecture has also enabled simple exuberance, whether an impromptu mass waltz filling the main concourse of New York’s Grand Central Terminal in The Fisher King or an out-of-control locomotive ploughing through Chicago’s concourse in Silver Streak. The former was done for real on location in a single night, the latter achieved by physical and visual effects and filming at Toronto Union Station. That Grand Central was, for many years, reachable by helicopter via the roof of the 59-storey Pan Am building towering over it is exploited in Coogan’s Bluff to create a vivid contrast between the world Arizona sheriff Clint Eastwood habitually commands and the kaleidoscopic, hedonistic metropolis he is forced to traverse to find his quarry.

The platform is a place of transition, a liminal space between stasis and motion often employed for scenes revolving around decisions or dilemmas. Arguably the most famous example is Brief Encounter, where the would-be-adulterous protagonists say their goodbyes each time they part and where, for one, an implied end could occur. Shooting at night heightens the tension by focusing on the characters and reducing the station and the train to illuminated backdrops. In the permanent night deep below the streets of New York the subway network is the unwitting host of an audacious robbery in The Taking of Pelham One Two Three. Once more, platforms represent options – does a police officer risk what is ahead, unseen and unknown? Does a thief and killer face the consequences of his actions, or take another direction? On an epic wartime train journey to freedom aboard Von Ryan’s Express, hundreds of escaped Allied prisoners repeatedly face choices on platforms or at the trackside, any one of which could result in disaster. To represent Florence’s main station, the cantilevered concrete canopies of Roma Ostiense were used – appropriately, given it was built to welcome Hitler in 1938 and includes fascist symbols.

On occasion, the perspective is altered. In Carlito’s Way , De Palma returns to trains but has his film both begin and end on a platform – the same one, in fact, since the entire story is told in flashback. For John Sturges, a Bad Day at Black Rock starts when a train that has for years passed through stops for a man to do his duty; outside the screen the world continues. In both films, the platform holds the power of life and death.

Once aboard, the small spaces of a train are well suited to intimate drama, where dialogue and the interplay of character are to the fore. The views constructed outside the windows become almost as important as how the characters move from one state to another in every sense. Yet even here thrillers conjure surprises from the linear, sequential layout of the corridor, the dining carriage and the baggage car. Alfred Hitchcock knew this: from The Lady Vanishes to Strangers on a Train. Later, still in his work, Roger Thornhill finds a moment to rest from unexpected travails in North by North West after an apparently chance meeting on a train, even if he and the audience are soon to find otherwise. Loaded conversations lead to action in the original Mission: Impossible, when the exterior of the train becomes as important as the interior and the whole enters the Channel Tunnel, increasing the pressure through a new type of space.

The James Bond franchise has understood all of these possibilities since its inception and demonstrates as much in early and recent installments. The barbed verbal ballet of Bond’s first meeting with Vesper Lynd in Casino Royale occurs in the comfortably colourless surroundings of a contemporary high-speed train, centering our attention on the conversation. A similarly sharp exchange between actual enemies in From Russia With Love is the prelude to a tightly choreographed and brutally fatal fight, the entire scene exploiting the compressed architecture of the sleeper carriage to the maximum. End of the line, indeed.

Chris Rogers writes, speaks and creates tours about architecture and other aspects of visual culture. He has written three books, including How to Read London – A crash course in London architecture (Ivy Press, 2017), a publisher's best-seller. His work and thoughts on architecture, film, art, design and television can be found at www.chrismrogers.net

Think Pieces

Beyond the Frame #13: Tracking Shot

Interiors