Danger Lights (1930)

If you like old trains, you'll probably love this. It features lots of steam locomotives and railroad workers. if you don't like trains, but like movies featuring love triangles, well, you're catered for here too. Yes, that could work as a dating profile thing. "Train buff looking for somebody who likes love triangles." Hmmm, might try that out later.

Dan Thorn (Louis Wolheim) is the rough and tough foreman of a Milwaukee train division. His management style is to shout at people and order them around. But, his workers respect him, and he seems to have their interests at heart. Either that, or they're scared of him. He's like one of those irrational managers where you don't know what mood they're going to be in on the day, so you try to stay on the right side of them regardless. He's in a relationship with Mary (Jean Arthur), but seems to be in love with the railroad more than his woman.

The film opens with a landslide blocking a track. Dan yells at his workers to clear the track. While at the site of the incident, he spots a group of drifters, and gets them to help out too. All apart from one: Larry Doyle (Robert Armstrong) who says that he only works when he wants to, and he doesn't want to work at that time. Dan deals with the situation by thumping Larry. And then thumping him again. Larry attempts to fight back, but misses and falls to the ground. Dan somehow sees something in Larry that he didn't see in the other vagrants. Call it grit, spunk, or whatever. I'm not too sure how or why. Larry's the only one of them who couldn't be arsed to help out. At least the rest do assist in shifting away some rocks. Dan gives Larry a job, invites him into his home, and asks him to accompany Mary to a party because he has pressing work matters to attend to. Larry repays Dan's generosity by stealing his girlfriend. Mary doesn't seem to have very high standards. Dan seems to have some sort of split personality disorder, and Larry, once a hobo, in one scene seems to have difficulty in knowing how to wipe soap and water off his face without the use of a towel.

Later in the movie, when Dan discovers Larry and Mary's betrayal, and is about to give him what for, Larry gets his foot stuck in a some sort of railway mechanism. Quite fortuitously as it happens. As a train approaches, Dan frees Larry, but is hit by the train instead. He's really not having a great time of it, is he? If only he'd have just left Larry on the ground at the beginning of them film. Dan needs emergency brain surgery, but the only place this can be done is Chicago. The solution is to get Dan to Chicago in five hours, which would mean exceeding the speed record on that line. Larry takes charge of a train to do just that, and the race to save Dan is about as exciting as the movie gets. There is some tension and action in the sequence, which brightens up an otherwise dull film, but also feels a little jarring against a movie that was mostly about melodrama and railroad realism. After Dan recovers, he allows Larry and Mary to couple up. The only coupling Dan is interested in is the coupling and decoupling of locomotives and their carriages. Oh yes, I'm quite proud of that little line. So he resumes bossing people about to keep his railroad running smoothly, and Larry and Mary presumably ride off into the sunset. By train of course.

Louis Wolheim as Dan, with his bulldog face and gravelly presence, is the most interesting of the human cast, though sadly this was one of his final roles before his untimely death in 1931. Robert Armstrong as Larry is… there. Jean Arthur does her best, but there will be much greater things to come for her in subsequent years.

Of course, it's the trains that steal the limelight in this film. It shows real locomotives in real action, and features a train tug-of-war and apparently the only known footage of a dynamometer, whatever one of those is. If you're a train buff, you'll probably get a kick out of it, but if you're looking for gripping human drama, it's best to look elsewhere. And why is it even called Danger Lights? Should have called it Trains and Love Triangles or Railroads and Red Flags or Landslide to Loserville.

Also of note, seeing as I've got my facts head on today (and not at all because I've been browsing the trivia section of IMDB), a widescreen version in 2:1 aspect ratio of this film was also made. However, the idea of widescreen movies was clearly something for the future, and that version of the film is long lost, with only the standard version remaining. Still, just for the train footage alone, it serves as a valuable historical artifact.