And as for the “Younger Generations” that do not have any idea about what “Danger Lights” was all about …[bow]
Here is a link to You Tube, and a copy of the 1933 Movie…Enjoy! [:-,]
IIRC, Classic Trains a couple years back had an article on the making of the movie.
Louis Wolheim was a very well known actor, having just been in “All Quiet on the Western Front” as the German sergeant who eventually gets killed. It was an early movie for Jean Arthur, who became a big star later in “Mr. Smith Goes To Washington”, “You Can’t Take it With You”, “The Devil and Miss Jones” etc. Robert Armstrong, who played the itinerant engineer that falls in love with Jean Arthur’s character, is best known for playing Carl Denham and saying the famous last line of the original “King Kong”:
Police Lieutenant: Well, Denham, the airplanes got him.
Carl Denham: Oh no, it wasn’t the airplanes. It was beauty killed the beast.
The following is from another post I wrote concerning rail-oriented movies:
"Danger Lights is noted for another reason besides having great location footage on The Milwaukee Road. Around 1930 the film industry was experimenting with various widescreen format technologies. Fox released several films in its Grandeur process, Warner Brothers had Vitascope, United Artists had Magnifilm, MGM had Realife and RKO, the studio that released Danger Lights, had Natural Vision. Danger Lights was the only RKO feature film that was relased in Natural Vision and this version played briefly in two theaters, one in Chicago and one in New York. The rest of the country saw Danger Lights in a standard 35mm release. Unfortunately, the widescreen version of Danger Lights has long since disappeared.
This link contains a frame from the widescreen version of Danger Lights:
http://www.nitrateville.com/viewtopic.php?f=3&t=18182
This link contains an ad for the widescreen version of Danger Lights:
http://www.in70mm.com/newsletter/2001/64/grandeur/
Ultimately, only 11 widescreen films were released in 1929-30 and, due to the incompability of the various widescreen formats, plus disinterest by exhibitors and public (who were still getting used to sound pictures), on top of oncoming problems emanating from the 1929 stock market crash, widescreen films would have to wait 20+ years to find general acceptance by the public and the film industry."
Myron Bilas
Max O’Hara: “Ladies and Gentlemen, Mr. Joseph Young of Africa.”
Talk about a thread being brought back from the dead…
I downloaded an MPEG file from the Internet Archive and had a bit of fun recognizing the stack of the Milwaukee shops in Miles City. The funniest part of the movie is watching the train speed westbound through Lombard "on its way to Chicago. Also funny was seeing a piece of Trans-Missouri division paperwork and the action in Sixteen Mile canyon - the TM division extended from Morbridge to Harlowton, Sixteen Mile Canyon was in the Rocky Mountain division.
- Erik