Joel Coen was an assistant editor on Sam Raimi’s Evil Dead. The Coens then wrote Crimewave, which Raimi directed. The Coens later hired a young cinematographer named Barry Sonnenfeld to shoot Blood Simple, and he stayed on for Raising Arizona. There was this small circle of filmmakers in the mid-80s who all treated the camera like it had somewhere to go. When DeVito stepped behind the camera for his first theatrical feature, he went straight for that manic energy and hired Sonnenfeld specifically because of those Coen films.
He’s said he was attracted to the way they moved the camera, the way they saw things from different angles. Sonnenfeld was right up his alley, and you can see it on screen. Sonnenfeld went on to bring that same restless camera to The Addams Family and Men in Black, but the connective tissue runs through all of them, back to Raimi’s Evil Dead cabin and a shared conviction that the camera is another performer in the scene.
Danny DeVito’s one of my favourite directors. Not only is he a master of straight-faced dark comedy, but his eye for framing and camera movement matches Raimi and the Coen Brothers at their sharpest. He’s got a knack for setting up scenes that inhabit three-dimensional space, and lets the camera pull the audience right into it. You might be watching a flat screen, but the action is all around you. His sensibilities are pure Termite Terrace.
There’s some Hitchcock in the setup, sure, but what’s on screen owes more to Chuck Jones. The timing’s elastic, the jokes land on takes and lags, the characters hang in awkward silence just long enough for things to buckle, and the reactions come late, or not at all. That kind of control is rare.
And in front of all that kinetic camerawork, he had Anne Ramsey. She was 59 when she played Momma, only fifteen years older than DeVito. She’d had throat cancer, and they’d removed parts of her tongue and jawbone, which is what you’re hearing in the performance. She insisted on doing her own stunts despite not being able to raise her arm above her head, and said she was having more fun than she’d had in years.
She got an Oscar nomination for the role, and when asked what it meant to her, she talked about acceptance after a long career of trying, but made clear she wasn’t done yet, that she had a lot more to do.
Sadly, she died in August of 1988, just four months after the ceremony.
But what she left behind in this film is pure comic precision, and DeVito knew exactly how to use it. -Pop
Throw Momma From the Train arrived on home video today in 1988, after a December 11, 1987 theatrical release.