I recently started a rewatch of Star Trek: Voyager (ding!), prompted because the person I’m dating expressed that this series was the most of interest because of their love of Kate Mulgrew, based solely on her performance in Orange is the New Black. We also recently watched Throw Momma from the Train, not because Kate Mulgrew was in it, but because it was on both of our lists, and it was a happy coincidence. 

Danny DeVito writes, directs, and co-stars in this late-80s comedy riff on Alfred Hitchcock’s Strangers on a Train, which appears in the film directly as the movie that DeVito’s character, Owen, sees at the behest of his beleaguered creative writing teacher. Said instructor is Larry, played by Billy Crystal, a man whose ex-wife Margaret (Mulgrew) stole the novel he wrote while they were together and is now seeing great success from it — interviews with Oprah, diamond earrings, a palatial Hawaiian estate, etc. Larry’s intense jealousy clouds his mind, and he’s stuck teaching a class of not-very-imaginative adult students who are trying to learn to write. Even among the students, Owen stands out as particularly unimaginative, although his daydreams about killing his overbearing, needy mother (Anne Ramsey) are colorful. When Owen starts to stalk Larry in order to get better insight into the creative process, he learns about Larry’s disastrous divorce and, when Larry suggests he go see a Hitchcock film to better understand how mysteries should be structured, Strangers on a Train just happens to be playing at the local cinema, he happens upon the idea of swapping murders. Misunderstanding Larry’s recommendations, he opts to fly straight to Hawaii and, seizing his opportunity, pushes Margaret overboard on a ferry while she dangles over the side to try and retrieve one of her earrings. Returning home, he now insists that Larry “fulfill” his end of their “bargain” and kill the titular momma, all while Larry tries to avoid being arrested for Margaret’s apparent murder. 

Throw Momma from the Train is a perfect little comedy, so tightly structured and so novel that it’s hard to imagine it being made today. Larry’s would-be relationship with colleague Beth (Kim Griest), who loves trains, allows for a lot of train imagery to be scattered throughout as foreshadowing of the film’s allusions as well as its finale. Ramsey is as perfectly loathsome here as she was just a couple of years prior in The Goonies, with her occasional moments of kindness implying a dementia that has rendered her this awful. Crystal is playing the same character that he always does, but when that character makes you the leading man for romcoms of an entire era, why deviate from the norm? Mulgrew’s character’s role in the story necessitates that she disappear fairly early in the runtime, but she makes a great meal out of her scenes, and it’s always fun to see her cut loose a little. It’s DeVito who’s absolutely wonderful here, playing Owen as someone so simple he’s utterly incapable of malice but is nonetheless too dim to be manipulated, at least intentionally. As an actor, his career has largely been made up of playing scoundrels and shitheels, and even though he is the antagonist of his film, you can never hate him. 

The film also gets a lot of mileage out of Larry’s class of wannabe writers. One of them is in the process of crafting a coffee table book entitled One Hundred Women I’d Like to Pork, which gets a nice payoff when we see the publication at Larry’s house in the film’s ending. My absolute favorite, however, has to be Mrs. Hazeltine, whose concluding paragraph to her story is, in its entirety: “‘Dive! Dive!’ yelled the Captain through the thing! So the man who makes it dive pressed a button, or a something, and it dove. And, the enemy was foiled again. ‘Looks like we foiled them again,’ said Dave. ‘Yeah,’ said the Captain. ‘We foiled those bastards again. Didn’t we, Dave.’ ‘Yeah,’ said Dave. The End.” If you’ve ever taken a short story class, it’s frighteningly familiar. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond