Throw Momma from the Train (1987)

Throw Momma from the Train arrived in 1987 as a broad comic reworking of Strangers on a Train, with Danny DeVito directing himself and Billy Crystal through a murder-swap plot that never quite earns its nastiness. The premise is elegant: a blocked novelist, a domineering mother, a stolen manuscript, a cruise ship. The execution is a series of escalating shouting matches. Roger Ebert found the plot top-heavy and the characters underused, and the intervening decades have not improved the ratio. What remains is a curio of late-eighties studio comedy, the kind that cast Anne Ramsey as a shrieking matriarch and let her win a Saturn Award for it.

The cultural accounting here is sparse. The cast is almost entirely white, with Branford Marsalis appearing as a music teacher and Oprah Winfrey cameoing as herself in a fictional episode of her own talk show. Neither presence carries any comment, and race is not a subject the film has any interest in addressing. The women fare no better: a manuscript-thieving ex-wife and an abusive mother, both written and played as comic obstacles, offer nothing in the way of a feminist reading. Body image, environmental concern, economic critique, neurodivergent framing. None of these are present, and the film would be bewildered by the suggestion.

This is not a failing so much as a period document. The film wants only to amuse, and it does so with a certain sweaty commitment, DeVito and Crystal trading exasperation like vaudevillians working a dying circuit. There is no sermon here, no lesson, no moral architecture. Just a man, a train, and a mother who will not stop talking.