The Good
It's great that this movie has been preserved on DVD for people to discover and own.
The Bad
Sadly, this movie just didn't hold up like I thought it would.
Well, don't ever say that I give everything from the 1980s a free pass because I have found my first casualty from that time. Sadly, it's a movie that I watched multiple times during the early part of that decade that came to be known as The Reagan Era.
Silver Streak sees Gene Wilder become mixed up in a convoluted scheme to kill off an art expert while he is traveling by train from Los Angeles to Chicago. Along the way he meets many people, the best of which is certainly Richard Pryor. Wilder gets thrown off the train a bunch of times, he figures out the murder only to realize it's more involved and at the end of the day I wished I was a kid again because ignorance of plot problems is truly bliss.
Features
No extras came with this DVD.
Video
Widescreen Anamorphic - 1.85:1. For me this will always be an 80s movie even though it came out theatrically in 1976. I can claim this because it wasn't until the 1980s that my family got a VCR and I was introduced to this and other films. That is one thing that this movie reminded me of. Those days when the VCR was a new item, there was only "mom and pop" video stores and every time my parents rented a movie, regardless of if it was good or bad, it was special.
Audio
Dolby Digital. English - Stereo and Mono. Spanish and French Mono. Subtitled in English and Spanish. Close Captioned. I had to turn up my TV about 3/4s of the way in order to be able to hear everything. I just think the audio might have been recorded a little bit too low on this disc. As there are no special features, this really doesn't effect anything else and as long as people don't mind turning up their systems, they shouldn't have any problems.
Package
They have really given this movie the 1970s treatment for this front cover. Gene Wilder, Jill Clayburgh and Richard Pryor are all on display here, as the Silver Streak s out of control underneath them. The back features some shots from the film (including the one where Pryor puts Wilder in blackface), a description of the movie, a cast list and some technical specs.
Final Word
Despite the fact that I remember Silver Streak being a much better movie than it was here, I refuse to give up on it entirely. I think I am going to revisit it again in a year simply because I loved this movie when I was younger. It really made me laugh and I watched it with my friends constantly.
So, if you like the chemistry between Richard Pryor and Gene Wilder, I would certainly suggest seeing this film. Owning it is another story altogether.