Night Train (1999)

[Guy Savage]

Night Train (1999)
A Journey to Hell in Night Train By Guy Savage

“Good judgment is a hard thing to men like Joey Butcher. It doesn’t matter who they are and what they’ve done. Hard luck and bitter circumstance get in the way.”

Modern noir film has two things in its favor: improved film technique and different standards for censorship, so in theory, neo noir should look better and could, potentially include more sex, more violence, blatant perversion and endings that don’t necessarily include the bad guys getting their just desserts delivered by the good guys. And Night Train from director Les Bernstien exemplifies just how far an updated noir film can go in terms of looks, presentation and plot.

First-time director Les Bernstien has an impressive back ground as a visual effects director of photography (Contact, Escape from L.A., Fight Club) and in Night Train, he appears to take everything he knows and uses it in this low-budget, low-life neo noir set in a sleazy corner of Tijuana. Mexico is a favorite setting for film noir. Classic noir icon Robert Mitchum often washed up south of the border. But in Night Train, tame Tijuana of the 40s and 50s is replaced and the film’s voice over narration explains:

“Down town Tijuana—a real nice place in its day. It catered to the best. Bullfighters, celebrities wanting a drink and a girl. Runaways wanting a new career.”

But this patina of respectable tourism has vanished and Bernstein’s Tijuana is the town where whores are cheap and people disappear in this no-holes barred playground for perversion. Bernstien doesn’t try to hide the fact that the story centres on the dregs of Tijuana society--in fact he seems to wallow in the gutter, opting to make the story as ugly as possible while simultaneously presenting that ugliness and converting it to beauty with exquisite camera shots, deep inky blacks and incredible use of light and shadow. The first shots of Tijuana include a bullfight in a packed arena and a shoeless woman stopping traffic as she humps an ambulance in meaningless, rhythmic motions. Whether a mystery key is retrieved from human excrement or a man vomits in the toilet, the camera captures it all--every horrifying shot and then delivers it with exquisite perfection.

Just as the plot embraces the tawdry and cheap side of life, the film’s presentation boldly embraces its low budget with a musical score that’s a cross between Ennio Morricone and the Ventures. In another brilliant stroke, dialogue was re-recorded against the original background noises in a process called “looping” and this replaced dialogue also serves to complement the film’s strange texture.

The plot is startling simple. Ex-con, Joey Butcher (John Voldstad) takes the night train to Tijuana to hook up with his brother Zach (also played by Voldstad). It may be “next stop, Tijuana,” but in reality it’s all aboard for a trip to hell. Joey received a telegram from Zach telling him to join him at the appropriately named Hotel Colon, “the center of the universe.” Once in Tijuana, Joey meets “resident American” the film’s narrator, Sam (Barry Cutler) a ferret-faced drifter who tells him that Zach is dead--killed as the result of a hit-and-run accident. Unable to return to America because he “did something bad,” Joey is committed to staying in Tijuana and discovering the truth about his brother’s death, and this brings him to the attention of a deviant dwarf, a homicidal stripper, and a snuff film ring.

As the days pass, Joey begins to undergo a physical transformation. Since everything from booze to women is “so damn cheap” he can lead a fairly unrestricted life. This results in constant drinking which leaves him with black ringed eyes and a stumbling gait as he careens from one trouble spot to another. Joey is on an endless roller coaster ride of alcoholic binges while women parade in and out of his room, and sweaty Joey, who packs a substantial gut, isn’t picky. Prostitutes, the vengeful stripper, Bobby (Nikoletta Skarlatos), and even Mary-Lou (Donna Pieroni), the hotel’s resident psycho all have sex with Joey and a few scenes show Joey laying in a half drunken stupor while he’s coyly teased, titillated and tweaked into performance by women grimly determined to ride him to the finish line. Forget love. Forget romance. Instead sex is an urge that’s met with a grubby encounter, a lackluster performance, and no illusions. As Bobby says, “We’re not married. I gave you a free fuck. Now go away.”

The film’s fantastic nightmarish hallucination sequences rival those of Stranger on the Third Floor, but in Night Train, the ghoulish nightmares take place in the whirl of toilet bowl water. Using bold phantasmagorical scenes reminiscent of Nosferatu and The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, Night Train is a clear illustration of film noir’s debt to German Expressionism. From the film’s opening scene of a breathtaking, spectacular shot of a bridge, this extraordinary, stunning visual adventure shows us just how magical the camera can be. The film’s incredible nightmare sequences are packed with symbolism--train tracks cross, merge and graveyards beckon. In one nightmare scene Joey crawls through a shrunken room across a mismatched geometrically patterned floor while other scenes are transposed on top for a layering effect. The film subtly foreshadows Joey’s fate by comparing Joey to the confused and weary bull trapped in the arena. Scenes of the slaughtered bull being dragged from the ring are juxtaposed with flashes of the disoriented Joey as he crawls across the floor, grunting and groaning.

As the film continues, Joey’s life becomes as bad as his nightmares. The film’s juxtaposition of nightmares and nightmarish reality and the symbolic merging and crossing of train tracks emphasize the idea that in Tijuana, Joey’s already marginal life has merged into a hellish existence. The sense that Tijuana is devoid of traditional societal boundaries transfuses into the film’s bizarre fabric, and effectively reinforces Night Train’s hypnotic circulus in which repulsiveness blends into beauty, nightmares merge into reality, and evil merges into good.

Night Train won’t appeal to all viewers. It’s an ugly tale, deliberately rough in spots and as cheap as the wasted lives it portrays. Bernstien doesn’t glamorize his characters or their environment, and neither does he glamorize their actions. There are no good guys in Night Train’s morally bankrupt universe, but by the time the film concludes, the thoroughly unpleasant Joey Butcher, who viciously tortures a man in the first scene, will begin to look like a boy scout in comparison to the other freaks, lowlifes, scumbags and murderers who surround him. Joey becomes a hero of sorts in a High-Plains-Drifter fucked-up way as he begins to grasp the horrifying truth about his brother’s Tijuana business interests. There are, after all, some depths that even low-life, violent career criminals won’t stoop to, and it’s down in Tijuana that Joey discovers a boundary even he won’t cross.

[Guy Savage]

Interview with Director Les Bernstein:

Please describe your background for our readers.

I’ve been in the film business for over 30 years working as a Visual Effects Director of Photography and Supervisor. My background is in photography and cinematography. I began in New York, where I grew up and went to school, but moved to Los Angeles and worked on films dating back to GHOSTBUSTERS and BEETLEJUICE. More recently, I’ve worked on films like APOCALYPTO and THE UNBORN.

What sort of budget did you have for Night Train and how did you get funding for the film?

NIGHT TRAIN’s budget, I’ll just say, was way less than a million. It would easily be a “Poverty Row” picture if this were the ‘40’s. I think even Edgar Ulmer would be proud. Funding was by way of private investors and out-of-pocket.

How long did it take you to make the film? What were the biggest hurdles?

It took 5 years to make the film, the same length of time it took Lynch to make ERASERHEAD. Biggest hurdle was getting it finished. Always easy to start a film, near impossible to finish one on my budget.

Did you use any unprofessional actors for the film and if so how did you find them?

Except for the leads (the parts of Joe, Bobby, Sam and MaryLou), all the parts were locals found around Tijuana. We even hired a prostitute for one scene, who wanted to do porn. We had to tell her this was not porn. Another “actress” we saw when we were walking from one location to another – she stopped an ambulance in the middle of the road by holding onto its radiator and proceeded to pee in the middle of the street. I just had to turn on a camera and film her, it was so precious. I think she was a little drunk.

Did any films act as an inspiration for Night Train?

I could go on for hours citing films that inspired NIGHT TRAIN, beginning, of course, with the great German Expressionist films like DER GOLEM, METROPOLIS, SPIONE, CABINET OF DR. CALIGARI, all the way through the many obscure noirs that I could get my hands on, from STRANGER ON THE 3RD FLOOR, DETOUR, HE WALKED BY NIGHT, KISS ME DEADLY, etc, etc. There are also the films of Herschell Gordon Lewis, Sergio Leone, Russ Meyer and Michael Powell’s great PEEPING TOM (obvious influence). From the noir canon, I must say that KISS ME DEADLY in particular, is one of my favorites and became a model for our sound design. Due to the budget restrictions, the “gun and run” method of shooting with a small, guerilla crew and lack of control over production sound, George Lockwood - a frequent collaborator and the editor/optical effects man/sound designer – wanted to experiment by completely looping EVERYTHING in the film. The surrealistic quality of KISS ME DEADLY’s bizarre sound design offered up the cacophonous answer and voila! NIGHT TRAIN was born. The result is very much like Tijuana: an aural assault on the senses. Not for everybody, though. I’ve gotten complaints.


Night Train is an incredible looking film. How did you create the German Expressionist look but updated with clear, deep inky blacks?

The look of NIGHT TRAIN took some experimenting. I found an (what was then) East German film stock from a company called ORWO, the parent of AGFA. I found out they were using a lot more silver in their B+W stock than anyone else (since 1917!) and my tests looked like no other stock. Also, it was cheap. I ordered a shitload of the stuff and pulled the trigger on starting the film. Later, I personally timed the film at DuArt Labs in New York and got incredible results. I kept pushing the timer to “go deeper” and richer with the blacks without clipping the highlights.

What special challenge does neo noir present for a director and a director of photography?

If you’re going to really do “noir” (I hate the term “neo” noir), you have to shoot B+W 35mm film stock and use hard light. There is no other way to do this. It is borne of the look and soul. Also, the term “Film Noir” as invented by the French does not really classify a genre. It is a feeling, like the “Feeling” movement in music. In film this is extended into the photography. The look of the film MUST have equal footing alongside the actors and screenplay. Not one element can overshadow the other. My experiment with NIGHT TRAIN failed because the look overshadowed my direction of the actors and the script, but hey, that’s part of a learning curve. If I were to do it again, I would keep everything the same; just work the actors harder, much harder. At the same time, I make no apologies any more than Ulmer would for DETOUR or Kubrick would for KILLER’S KISS (although he disowned FEAR AND DESIRE). It’s all part of a curve and there’s no sense repeating yourself.

In your experience how has the use of mechanical effects in film impacted optical effects?

Optical Effects no longer exist; they are now all digital (NIGHT TRAIN used all Optical and “in-camera” effects). Mechanical effects work on the set and digital effects go hand-in-hand with these techniques for post-production. As we say in the film business, if you can “get it real” then do it real. I think Mechanical effects will never go away, and in fact, get more sophisticated.

In the hallucination scenes, sequences appear to be layered on top of each other. How is this achieved?

George Lockwood did all of the post Optical composite effects. The hallucination sequences, in particular, required many long hours of shooting one layer, backwinding the film on the printer and shooting another layer on top of the previous. Some of the shots I created with glass paintings, matte paintings, swirling water effects, and what we call “elements,” which are individual pieces of an effect shot against black, then exposed later on top of a scene. I did a lot of this shooting in a rented warehouse and in my garage. George then later took these pieces and after hours of the two of us sitting around and discussing in front of the film on a flatbed editor, composited the pieces on an optical printer. A lot of work.

Would you explain the role of the lyrically beautiful Torch Song sequence?

In Mexican cinema (even in Hong Kong cinema), the role of a “reflective song” creates a breathing space for the pacing of the film. The Torch Song sequence allows the main character to look back on his life up to that point and reflect on how he got there. It ends with him sitting in the pile of money everyone is looking for. Also, it helps bring the length of the film up to 80 minutes.

How did it feel to make a film in which you had so much project control?

Because the film was so low-budget and largely self-financed, I, like Mel Gibson (the only true independent filmmaker left), had to answer to no one. It felt great and frustrating at the same time because money was such a factor (unlike, say, Mel Gibson).

How do you feel about noir and German Expressionism? How much do you think these genres have added to filmmaking?

German Expressionism helped fuel what became film noir. If not for the economic/ post-war trauma of the time and the European émigrés in Hollywood, noir would not have had its “bite” and would probably be just like any other stupid period in American cinema (like right now). Its influence goes all the way to guys like Martin Scorcese (MEAN STREETS, TAXI DRIVER), Francis Ford Coppola (GODFATHER, THE CONVERSATION), Paul Schraeder, and writers like James Ellroy. Noir was the true period of originality in American cinema. Except maybe for MGM musicals. Just ask the French.

What are you working on at the moment?

Right now I am working on a couple of documentaries, one about jazz and urbanism in Tijuana and another about the collision of the US Mafia and the rebel forces during the Cuban Revolution. The Cuban film will also, hopefully, later be made into a narrative about the 2 men whose stories I am telling in the documentary, representing both sides of the conflict. I’m quite excited about that project because it shows a really ugly side of US crime and complicity in Cuban affairs. It’s never been done before. It was alluded to in GODFATHER II, however. Also, I’m working on some noir scripts, of course…