Movie Details
| Title: | The Gravy Train | |
| Director: | Jack Starrett | |
| Year: | 1974 | |
| Genre: | Comedy | |
| Times Seen: | 1 | |
| Last Seen: | 04.27.06 |
Other Movies Seen By This Director (4)
- Cleopatra Jones
- Hollywood Man
- The Losers
- Race with the Devil
| Date Viewed | Venue | Note |
| 04.27.06 | Alamo Downtown | This Screening is part of event: Best of QT Fest I didn't write any notable lines down for this next film however. If i did I'd have spent the entire movie looking down at my notebook. Actually that's not true, I did write down one line: "I want my pants I gotta go see my mom!" Oops, I wrote down one more: "Can you warble?" Basically, The Gravy Train (AKA The Dion Brothers) is the best movie ever made. Need a little more detail? OK. Stacy Keach and Frederic Forrest play brothers from West Virginia who quit their jobs (Keach quits shovelling dog food in an agitated fury, calling it busy work that don't mean nothing and that he could be Kirk Douglas. Flexing his biceps he yells "KIRK FUCKIN' DOUGLAS!" Forrest... well, he throws his miner's helmet through the foreman's window) and move to DC with dreams of opening up a seafood joint called The Blue Grotto. Such items to be featured on the menu are octopus on ice, oysters casino, and eel. Unfortunately, they need to pull an armored car job to raise the capital for the place so they put on their best criminal face and successfully steal some loot with an Italian named Tony, a Puerto Rican named Carlo, and a body builder family man named Rex. Tony and Carlo pull a double cross and the Dion boys find themselves in some hot water. No kidding, every single line of dialogue in this movie is funny. It's backwood West Virginia hick humor done perfectly. The dynamic between Keach and Forrest is completely natural and kinetic... scene after scene they 100% live up on that screen and they are hilarious together. Scene after scene, gag after gag, laugh after laugh, it's all good. At this point I'm not even sure if I should go on... I can already tell I'm not doing the film justice and too lazy to even try. Toward the end though, there's a chicken dude that just sort of pops up, absolutely kills in the dozen or so lines that he has, then disappears. Afterward, Eric said that the sequel that he's got in his mind has Keach and the chicken dude partnering for a chicken and seafood restaraunt. I would pay to see that movie. Also, the film ends with an action sequence that takes place in a building being torn down with a wrecking ball. Seriously, there are some shots showing a wrecking ball knocking walls, supports, bricks, and mortar apart, crushing them to dust and debris, while actors or stuntment or gullible fools who'll do anything for ten bucks pretend to fight each other. I'm watching this scene and can't help but be blown away by this. I mean, they are TEARING THIS BUILDING DOWN. TO THE GROUND. and they are shooting in it. Now I know a lot of the inserts must be rigged with fake debris or even a light-weight stunt wrecking ball but still, there are some shots in this sequence that show people feet away from the wrecking ball doing its job. that's just... that's just crazy. So yeah... oh, Quentin told us that Terrence Malick wrote the script... he took his name off of it but who knows why. It's hands down the best mix of comedy and action I've ever seen. |
