Dining wagons will be added to new German express trains, now that the BordBistro snack wagons are disappearing, according to German media. The luxurious dining car for dining in a speeding train has fascinated filmmakers since the steam train. Four examples of films in which the dramatic dining car possibilities – tension, romance, menace, humor – have been memorably exploited:
1. A tea drinking scene in a dining car plays a crucial role in the exciting film The Lady Vanishes by Alfred Hitchcock from 1938. An elderly lady, Miss Froy (played by Dame May Whitty), mysteriously disappears from a moving train after having tea in the dining car with passenger Iris Henderson (played by Margaret Lockwood). They look for her, but fellow passengers deny having seen her. Not until the tea bag of Miss Froy's own herbal tea (thrown from the train with kitchen waste)Harriman's Herbal Tea) sticks to the train window, Iris can prove that the missing lady was really on board.
2. The luxurious Wagon-Lits dining and bar wagons of the Orient Express are important places for Belgian detective Hercule Poirot to observe suspects. This can be seen in the many film adaptations of Agatha Christies Murder on the Orient Expressalso in the recent one from 2017 with Kenneth Branagh as Poirot.
3. The dining car and its kitchen are veritable pools of death in the darkly humorous film about a Japanese superfast train, Bullet Train (2022). Brad Pitt plays a clumsy hitman who has to fight to the death in the kitchen wagon, with a sushi cutting board as a weapon. He stows the dead like drunken travelers in the bar wagon.
4. Romance and humor in the dining car compete for priority in the TV comedy series The Big Bang Theory when nerd and train fanatic Sheldon Cooper receives a romantic dinner from his girlfriend for Valentine's Day: on a moving historic train. That goes quite wrong because he is more interested in train facts than in food and romance.
#times #dining #car #movie #star #Hitchcock39s #train #film #Hercule #Poirot
