Producers: Brad Wyman, Michael Gerstein, Carl Steen, Malcolm McDowell, James Paxton, Adam Rifkin, Doug Ansell and Matt Williams Director: Adam Rifkin Screenplay: Michele Rifkin Cast: Malcolm McDowell, James Paxton, Laura Marano, Lee Arenberg, King Orba, M.C. Gainey, Mehdi Ajroudi, Marshall Bell, Miles Dougal, Craig Stark, Nate Hartman, Mary Steenburgen and Bernadette Peters Distributor: Vitagraph Pictures/TriCoast Entertainment
Grade: C
It’s understandable that Malcolm McDowell has been trying to get “Last Train to Fortune” made for more than thirty years. (He’d arranged for Lindsay Anderson to direct it in 1994 with Bill Paxton co-starring, but the project fell apart when Anderson, who’d directed him in “If….” And “O Lucky Man!,” died.) Finally made three decades later, it provides him with his juiciest role in years.
The script was actually written in the mid-eighties by Michele Rifkin, a fish-out-of-water tale of English teacher Cecil Peachtree (McDowell), who takes a job in a podunk town in the American West in the late 1800s. He’s unemployable in the U.K. because of an altercation with his headmaster, and shunned in the posher environs of the eastern U.S. as well. The town of Fortune, in the middle of nowhere, was his sole option.
But the last leg of his journey there meets with a snag; he’s missed the last train for Fortune, leaving him stranded at the remote Preston City station with his two suitcases (one containing his meagre belongings, the other his treasured books) about ten miles away. Sitting beside the tracks disconsolate after the station master (Marshall Bell) has told him to walk if he’s in a hurry, he’s robbed by gunman Jedidiah Dooley (James Paxton, Bill’s son), the loss of the watch inscribed to him by his father especially galling.
Undeterred, he proposes a plan to the young outlaw, who’s disappointed with the take: if he’ll lead him to Fortune by Monday morning, when his term begins, he’ll turn over his first month’s salary. Jed agrees to the deal, and they set off, Cecil at first walking alongside Jed’s horse and then sharing the ride.
Perhaps Michele Rifkin was inspired by “Ruggles of Red Gap,” which placed another well-bred, well-educated Brit in similarly primitive circumstances, but her script lacks the wit and polish of the one Walter DeLeon and Harlan Thompson provided for Leo McCarey’s 1935 classic. It’s just an episodic, though genial, account of the bond that grows between Cecil and Jed over the course of their journey.
They meet an Indian who, much to Cecil’s surprise, is exceptionally well-read. They have to deal with Snake (M.C. Gainey) and Charlie (Mehdi Ajroudi), two saddle toughs with a beef against Jed; their second meeting, to be honest, is too brutal to feel at home in this easygoing context. At a town called Lobo, they get into an altercation with Chet Rivers (King Orba), to whom Jed loses Cecil’s watch in a poker game; there they also spend time with Miss Lily (Bernadette Peters), the owner of the local saloon, and Amanda (Laua Marano), who works at the place and is sweet on Jed. They also become the unwilling guests of the sheriff (Lee Arenberg) for a spell.
Throughout the journey, Cecil talks, and talks, and talks, and though McDowell is no Charles Laughton, he savors every orotund line about the importance of education and literature, delivering his non-stop speeches in theatrically plummy tones. Though Cecil is having a rough time, McDowell is enjoying every moment—even an unfortunate scene in which Peachtree throws up after sampling some of Miss Lily’s rotgut.
It’s an interesting thought experiment to wonder how he would have played the part in the mid-nineties when his career had already entered a steep decline but, just entering his fifties, he still had a lot of energy. Instead, he shot the film as he was approaching eighty, and though he certainly doesn’t spare himself, there are moments when you might worry about him putting himself through some physically taxing sequences.
It’s also intriguing to wonder how his younger self might have interacted with Bill Paxton under Anderson’s direction. One expects that the film would have had considerably more verve, since though James Paxton seems an agreeable young fellow, he lacks screen charisma, and Adam Rifkin, directing his mother’s screenplay, comes across as at best a competent journeyman who doesn’t bring much vigor to the piece; he and editor Daniel Flesher appear content merely to give free rein to the actors to do their thing. That allows McDowell to go fully operatic, but it doesn’t inject much vitality into the pallid Paxton. The movie should be a comedic pas de deux, but here only one partner is working at full strength.
Among those in support, Peters and Marano stand out, though everyone is at least adequate. Mary Steenburgen appears only in what amounts to a cameo in the last scene, which is the culmination of the escalating sentimentality infecting the movie’s last act.
This is obviously a low-budget effort, but cinematographer Chase Bowman offers some nice widescreen images of the California locations, and the production design (Jenna Rae Tooley) and costumes (Samantha Pavlat) are fine. The score by Jack Ryan Sullivan and Beckett McDowell leans heavily on Western tropes, but isn’t too overbearing.
If you approach “Last Train to Fortune” as a one-man show for Malcolm McDowell, its ninety minutes will pass fairly agreeably. But overall, it’s a pretty thin fable about an unlikely friendship in the Old West.