Director Jean Durand amassed over 250 credits, mostly shorts/mostly for Gaumont, peaking in the pre-war years and out of the biz by his mid-40s before sound came in. He must have been a handy guy to have around in those early days, churning out comedies that mixed Mack Sennett clownish eccentrics with Georges Méliès technical trickery (and nearly as tiresome); adventuress romances courtesy of daring wife Berthe Dagmar, who liked to work with wild/exotic animals; serials (none seen here); and tales of the untamed American West filmed in France (Pommes Frites Westerns?), as here. Standing head & shoulders above anything else we’ve seen from Durand, and something of an astonishment for 1912, it’s a worthy precursor of the last two reels of Erich von Stroheim’s famously mutilated (but still phenomenal) GREED/’24.* The two reeler (at least the 17minutes we have of it; 1912 two-reelers could last nearly a half hour using a slow cranking speed), opens in medias res, with a dying man discovered in a field by a pair of presumably prospecting partners. His dying secret the exact location of a gold load, not ore, but a cache of gold nuggets. Only problem, the 50/50 share the men had sworn to, lands in a notebook one of the ‘pals’ holds in the inner breast pocket of his jacket. So the race is on, largely by train to claim the prize. And the stunting (including fights on the roof of a moving train) are gasp inducing. No effects here, no cutaways or stunt doubles. Just a couple of regular guys holding on for their lives before a nihilistic ending Stroheim would have okayed.
DOUBLE-BILL/LINK: As mentioned, the basic situation raised to the heights in GREED. OR: A selection of Jean Durand is out on a Gaumont Treasures DVD (Vol. 2/Disc 2). But if you can deal with French-Only title cards, here’s a link to the same print of RAILWAY sans translation. https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2019/08/greed-1924.html https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=raWCzOg_X14
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