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Author
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Topic: The Railrodder DVD
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Steve Klare
Film Guy
Posts: 7016
From: Long Island, NY, USA
Registered: Jun 2003
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posted June 28, 2018 09:44 AM
The Railrodder
National Film Board of Canada, 1965
I have enjoyed this great little short since I first stumbled across it on You Tube. It’s a great adventure story and kind of a modern take on silent film. Getting to the point of being able to put it up on the big screen has been kind of an adventure all by itself.
Buster Keaton was 69 years old here, yet still his classic self. He goes through the whole adventure deadpan. He reads an ad. about seeing Canada in a London newspaper and literally dives in, wading up on the beach in Eastern Canada some time later, not only none the worse for wear but completely dry! He takes a seat on a vacant railroad speeder and the adventure begins!
This one is full of this kind of silent movie magic. Not only does he roll all the way across to the Pacific coast on just the gas in the speeder’s tank without any railroad intervening, but there is this storage box aboard that has everything he could ever need and much more: a bear skin coat, a glass plate camera, a tea set, a shotgun, a camp stove and pots and pans and of course his classic pork-pie hat. (It's as if the thing is about five feet deep instead of maybe just one!)
Aboard his tiny, mobile home he does all sorts of things:
He cooks his meals,
He goes hunting for wild geese,
When he gets out to the Rockies and the air turns cold he takes up knitting,
He also does some glass plate photography, does a little rail speeder preventive maintenance, tidies the “place” up, has afternoon tea with a thunderstorm threatening and takes in the sights.
This is a silent film, and then again it isn’t. There is a soundtrack: synced sound and music, but then again the STAR is silent. All the way from London to the Pacific shore he doesn’t say a thing!
Buster Keaton was pushing 70 years old and in the early stages of the lung cancer that would take him two years later, yet there he is riding a rail speeder standing up with a map over his head crossing a railroad bridge 50 feet in the air! The people making the film who were half his age tried to slow him down, but the old pro that made The General would only do it his way!
This film was produced to encourage people to do (…in their own legal way) what Buster did: to see Canada. The scenery is wonderful and you get a fair smattering of great Canadian places. I think I picked up Quebec City, Montreal, Ottawa, the Great Plains out in Manitoba, the Canadian Rockies and the Pacific Coast. You have to use your imagination here since these are all shown without any kind of commentary. (So if I am wrong here, your guess was just better than mine!)
As I said: getting this one on my big screen was a little bit of an adventure. A pristine Super-8 magnetic sound print would have worked out fine, but that’s a lot to ask. The National Film board of Canada is very, very lightly represented on 8. 16mm is more promising: for a long time this was their prime distribution format and back in the day there could have been hundreds of prints. I’ve looked, but so far no luck. Part of the problem too is a great many of these would be library prints and would be a little bit experienced.
So then we turn to my Epson VP and the silver disk. This is available on Amazon, but often it’s at some pretty astounding prices for a DVD. There was…another DVD I saw which seemed like kind of a bargain. When I got it turned out to be a transfer of some battle-worn 16mm print: lines, fade, schmutz.
This may be one of those cases where the pirates actually help out the legit guys! I knew I would never show this thing to company, but I really liked the film and I vowed to get the real deal.
I decided to bypass the middle man and go right to the source.
I’ve been buying video from the NFB for years. It used to be they had a sales office in New York and you called up, credit card in hand and talked to the nice person: couple days later you had a nice VHS in your mailbox. (Yes, THAT long ago.)
Until recently, buying DVDs on their website was a little bit too much of a process. My wife tried to buy me one for Christmas and actually gave up! (Considering my wife’s absolutely predatory shopping instincts, this is astounding!)
-yet I’m happy to say all is well. The National Film board of Canada has brought in an external media distributor to handle their DVD sales and it went very well. It was much cheaper than Amazon, too!
I’m also happy to say that my new Railrodder looks really good. They even threw in a couple of light base side scratches for a few seconds once, just so you remember where it’s from!
It also includes “Buster Keaton Rides Again”: kind of a “making of” documentary in black and white, which has a lot of interesting detail about both the Railrodder and Buster Keaton.
The joy of all this is if that 16mm print actually does come along some day, there’s still no reason I shouldn’t buy it, but even if it never comes I can still enjoy a great film.
The Railrodder at the National Film Board of Canada
NFB DVDs at Mcintyre Media
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All I ask is a wide screen and a projector to light her by...
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Osi Osgood
Film God
Posts: 10204
From: Mountian Home, ID.
Registered: Jul 2005
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posted June 28, 2018 11:17 AM
I LOVE this little film and it was a great one for Buster keaton to go out on, (I think it was either his last or next to last film that he was in).
You're definitely right, Steve, an incredibly charming film. It would be a GREAT candidate for a super 8 release! Personally, I would love to see it released on black and white film stock personally, (keeping it in "homage" to all of his great B/W classic films), but i suppose film purists would want to see it in the color it was shot on.
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"All these moments will be lost in time, just like ... tears, in the rain. "
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Steve Klare
Film Guy
Posts: 7016
From: Long Island, NY, USA
Registered: Jun 2003
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posted June 28, 2018 03:16 PM
Matt,
We throw it on screen quite a bit at home too. A maybe a year ago I did a Buster Keaton double feature with my Super-8 Blackhawk scored "Cops" and the first Railrodder DVD I had.
From what I've learned it was shot without sound on location and everything was later dubbed in.
-this makes a lot of sense given what I saw in "Buster Keaton Rides Again": there was no sound equipment in evidence.
Besides, capturing sound in locations where for example there is a lot of wind or other uncontrollable ambient noise is a headache!
I remember in the NFB Song of The Paddle, they shot lip-sync footage of a conversation the Mason family was having inside their tent, so they did location sound.
-you can hear the camera throughout the scene. I guess it was the lesser evil compared to dubbing in 4 people (including two kids) later on.
Hey!
Let's do a little Buster Keaton trivia!
-he appears in "It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World".
Describe the scene.
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All I ask is a wide screen and a projector to light her by...
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Steve Klare
Film Guy
Posts: 7016
From: Long Island, NY, USA
Registered: Jun 2003
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posted June 28, 2018 08:45 PM
I'd like a copy of The General, Graham, and my preference would be Blackhawk!
(-yet, push comes to shove I would be flexible rather than never see it...)
OK, here is the answer to our trivia Quiz:
"Jimmy"
It seems that Captain Culpepper was supposed to have an accomplice: "Jimmy", played by Buster Keaton. There was more of Jimmy in the original cut of the movie, but by the time they whittled it down to the mere shadow of itself it became, this was all that was left of him!
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All I ask is a wide screen and a projector to light her by...
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UBBFriend: Email this page to someone!
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...let me know. You certainly wont have any problem with the Epson, that thing will do just about everything ![[Cool]](cool.gif)
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