Throw Momma from the Train **** (1987, Danny DeVito, Billy Crystal, Anne Ramsey, Kim Greist, Kate Mulgrew, Annie Ross, Rob Reiner, Bruce Kirby) – Classic Movie Review 4935

Director/ star Danny DeVito’s gleefully entertaining 1987 directorial feature film debut is yet another raid on the work of Alfred Hitchcock. This time it is a bright and breezy black comedy about a student in a community college writing class who is advised by his teacher to see Hitchcock’s 1951 movie Strangers on a Train for insight into plot development.

Student Owen Lift, who has previously been fantasising about killing his mother and has overheard teacher Larry Donner’s rant that he wishes his ex-wife dead, now gets the idea that he wants to copy the plot of Strangers on a Train by getting his professor to swap murders with him.

DeVito plays the timid, middle-aged pupil Owen Lift, who still lives with his domineering, abusive and paranoid mother (Anne Ramsey, stealing the film in the role of a lifetime). Billy Crystal plays Larry Donner, the novelist teacher who cannot write his novel because he has writer’s block through his resentment and jealousy for his ex-wife Margaret (Kate Mulgrew), who stole his book and got mainstream literary success and critical acclaim with it.

The three stars are perfectly cast, clearly enjoying the manic, funny script with its darkly humorous tone and the imaginative, fast-moving pace of DeVito’s direction. DeVito and Crystal share good chemistry, making a good team, and Ramsey is stupendous, while DeVito’s direction keeps his film moving smoothly and amusingly, with the script’s enjoyable hints of a nasty tone finally giving way to a warm feel-good ending.

Anne Ramsey (27 March 1929 – 11 August 1988) died of cancer aged 59 soon after making the movie but her portrayal of the overbearing Mrs Lift is great and she received a nomination for or a Golden Globe Award and the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress. She is also well known for portraying Mama Fratelli in The Goonies (1985), which won her a Saturn Award for Best Supporting Actress, with a second one for this movie.

Also in the cast are Kim Greist as Larry’s girlfriend Beth, Branford Marsalis as Lester, Annie Ross as Mrs Hazeltine, Rob Reiner as Larry’s agent Joel and Bruce Kirby as Detective DeBenedetto, with Oprah Winfrey as Herself.

Screen-writer Stu Silver cheerfully rips off Patricia Highsmith’s plot for the Hitchcock movie, in which Robert Walker’s character Bruno has a domineering mother he wants to murder and targets Farley Granger’s character Guy to swap murders with him. We see Walker and Granger in archive footage.

Cinematographer Barry Sonnenfeld, who provides the stylishly flashy images, went on to direct The Addams Family.

The TV version edits the four-letter words.

The title comes from Patti Page’s 1956 hit song, ‘Mama from the Train (A Kiss, A Kiss)’.

It suffered some fairly hostile reviews among the good ones, but was a hit, taking $58 million on a lowish budget of $14 million.

© Derek Winnert 2017 Classic Movie Review 4935

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