Riding the Rails offers a visionary perspective on the presumed romanticism of the road and cautionary legacy of the Great Depression. The filmmakers relay the experiences and painful recollections of these now-elderly survivors of the rails. Forced to travel more by economic necessity than the spirit of adventure, the film's subjects dispel romantic myths of a hobo existence and its corresponding veneer of freedom. Riding the Rails recounts the hoboes' trade secrets for survival and accounts of dank miseries, loneliness, imprisonment, death, and dispossession. Sixty years later, the filmmakers transport their subjects back to the tracks, where the surging impact of sound and movement resuscitates memories of a shattered adolescence and devastating rite of passage.
Richard Thomas
Narrator
La Tragédie des Brigades Internationales
Land Without Bread
The Man Who Was There
Bombshell: The Hedy Lamarr Story
Nanking
Churchill and the Movie Mogul
The Massie Affair
Elemental: Hydrogen vs. Hindenburg
Dix Jours dans la guerre d'Espagne
The Imperial Lullaby
THE WHOLE SHEBANG
The American Hobo: History of the Railriding Worker
