Planes, Trains & Automobiles

Chaplin is the main ideal, supplemented with an idea out of Frost’s “A Hundred Collars” (secured by a note from “Brown’s Descent, or the Willy-Nilly Slide”).

It ought to be simple to go from business in New York to Thanksgiving dinner in Chicago, but the salesman intervenes, a poor loveless soul endlessly chatting on about nothing, who inspires with gratitude ultimately those that by the grace of God already have a gimmick.

The precision and weight of the players fills the screen, and the camera records very accurate divisions of the scene into countless studies of the deadpan doled out by saintliness and “stark insensibility” modified by priggishness and want.