YMMV / Silver Streak

• Awesome Music: Henry Mancini's score is not only romantic and soaringly beautiful, but also throbs with a locomotive rhythm that fits the film like a glove.
• Crosses the Line Twice: The scene in which George dons blackface and acts like a stereotypical black man is both offensive and amusing.
• Hilarious in Hindsight: Richard Kiel has a small supporting role as a Giant Mook with bad dental work. In his autobiography, Kiel relates how one reporter from the premiere of The Spy Who Loved Me pissed him off by trying to manufacture a controversy by asking him if Eon was trying to rip Silver Streak off by casting him as Jaws.
• Narm Charm: Patrick McGoohan in his delivery of the following line, was intended to be very chilling and threatening. But...
  Deverau: "Keep your foot on the pedalllllllllll."
• Older Than They Think: Modern viewers used to seeing Richard Kiel play Expies of his iconic Bond character Jaws would be forgiven for seeing him appear in this film with the exact same metal dentures and think it's another example of that. In fact, this film was released one year before The Spy Who Loved Me.
• Retroactive Recognition: A young, pre-fame Fred Willard briefly appears as the assistant Chicago dispatcher toward the end.
• Spiritual Successor: To Alfred Hitchcock's The Lady Vanishes and North By Northwest, both of which this film's director (Arthur Hiller) and screenwriter (Colin Higgins) admired.
• Unintentional Period Piece:
  • A character drives a Volkswagen Thing, which was a contemporary car at the time but is now considered an oddball classic.
  • The quantity of liquor available on American inter-city passenger trains along with open consumption in public spaces.
  • Lots of people are shown smoking on the train. In fact, the sheer number of people smoking in the film, including our protagonists, is a bit dated.
  • Also George and most of the other male characters wear bell bottom pants, which completely date the movie as made in the 1970s.
  • George listens to a handheld transistor radio when in disguise as a black man, something that no one really uses today.
  • And Tab, which still does exist in a few markets, but is nowhere near the go-to for diet soda that it once was. It was ultimately discontinued in the 2010s.
• Values Dissonance: The blackface scene was toeing the line when it was made in the 1970s, and it's certainly looked at much differently today.

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