File spoon-archives/marxism-international.archive/marxism-international_1997/marxism-international.9709, message 337


Date: Wed, 17 Sep 1997 14:56:58 -0400
From: Louis Proyect <lnp3-AT-columbia.edu>
Subject: M-I: Riding the Rails


When Michael Uys and Lexy Lovell decided to make a documentary about
teenagers who rode the rails during the Great Depression, they placed an ad
in "Modern Maturity", the magazine of the American Association of Retired
People (AARP). To their astonishment, they received 3,000 moving and
detailed replies. The film focuses on a group of nine men and one woman who
reminisce about their experience as hobos. Their interviews are
interspersed with archival footage from the 1930s and they add up to a
revealing portrait of how young people coped with the ravages of unemployment.

"Riding the Rails" is not just about the hardships of riding in boxcars,
panhandling or living in shanty-towns. It is also about the romance of the
railroads. For many young people, including some from affluent families,
freight trains were an escape from the routines and banality of small-town
life. One interviewee says that " We thought it was the magic carpet . . .
romance, the click of the rails." This fascination with trains persisted
into the 1940s and 50s. Jack Kerouac often hopped on freight trains when he
wasn't tooling across Route 66 in his Hudson. He was fascinated with hobo
life and saw this as an expression of freedom and individuality. So do the
interviewees in "Riding the Rail" who are about as endearing a group of 70
and 80 year olds that I have encountered in a film since Julia Reichert's
1983 documentary "Seeing Red." It is no coincidence that nearly all of the
former hobos eventually became involved with radical or trade union politics.

For most of the interviewees, it was poverty that drove them to ride the
rails. They often got on a train headed in the direction where they thought
work was plentiful. They had the same sort of illusions as the Okies in
Steinbeck's "Grapes of Wrath." They soon discovered that there were no
jobs. When they got off a boxcar, they would be met at the outskirts of a
town by a sheriff who'd tell them, "We don't have work for grown men with
families. How do you expect us to find a job for you?" Instead, they would
often survive in hobo camps on the outskirts of where they would eat every
two or three days. They would make forays into town and panhandle for
nickels and dimes. The sight of teen-aged beggars scandalized public
opinion and was a primary factor in the creation of the Civilian
Conservation Corps (CCC), which put tens of thousands of impoverished
adolescents to work. It is a sign of the times that the Clinton
administration lacks the political will to push for these sorts of programs.

The documentary includes scenes from William Wellman's "Wild Boys of the
Open Road," a 1933 feature that is being shown with "Riding the Rails" in
New York City's Cinema Village. "Wild Boys of the Open Road" is a
remarkable film. It depicts the hobo life of two teenage boys and one girl
in shockingly unsentimental terms. One of the boys loses a leg in a rail
yard accident and the girl is raped by a railroad bull (cop). This is not
John Ford's "Grapes of Wrath", with its burnished, sentimental tableaus of
life on the open road. It is a film that has more in common with Bunuel's
"El Grito" or Hector Babenco's "Pixote", films that depict the suffering of
poor kids on the streets of Mexico and Brazil in the most unflinching
manner. Perhaps the only explanation for the frankness of "Wild Boys of the
Open Road" is that it was made before any of the New Deal major social
programs had been implemented, including the CCC. Wellman must have been
appalled by the misery of America's children and made a movie without
illusions. It is too bad that so few films come out of Hollywood that have
the same courage to depict the suffering of our own children today.

Louis Proyect




     --- from list marxism-international-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu ---

   

Driftline Main Page

 

Display software: ArchTracker © Malgosia Askanas, 2000-2005