Los Angeles. Novelist Larry Donner hates his ex-wife Margaret who stole his manuscript, published it and got a bestseller. Larry is a lecturer at a writing course, and his student Owen misunderstands their conversation when Larry advises him to go watch Hitchcock's "Strangers on a Train", and assumes that is a signal that Owen should kill Larry's ex-wife, and that he will in return kill Owen's unbearable mother. Margaret indeed disappears from a cruise voyage in Hawaii, and Owen now asks Larry to keep his end of the "deal". Larry refuses to kill Owen's mom, and even saves her from falling off a train. Margaret reappears since she only slipped from the ship into the sea, but survived. A year later, Larry writes a crime novel based on his misadventures with Owen.
Danny DeVito's feature length debut film as a director, "Throw Momma from the Train" is arguably the best film he directed, and is underrated. Filled with several delicious little jokes, black humor, inspired ideas and vitality, this is a strong comedy film from the 80s, though it unfortunately falls apart in the chaotic, aimless last third. Billy Crystal is excellent as the novelist Larry, as is Anne Ramsey in one of her last roles as the irritating, unbearable mom (but the problem is that her character is underwritten, without any more elaborate "acting scenes" to find out more about her personality than just shouting and being a maniac), whereas DeVito shows a lot of directing finesse in crafting careful scene transitions: for instance, Larry is watching his ex-wife on TV in the Oprah Winfrey show, as there is a cut to another TV with said show, watched by mom who turns around and shouts, as the camera drives back across the room to go to Owen in the next room. In another scene, Owen interrupts Larry's date in an amusement park and asks if he liked his crime story, but Larry replies with: "No!" Cut to the next scene of Larry in bed, his phone ringing, he picks it up, as Owen's voice is heard: "Why not?" Cut to another time jump, as we see Owen and Larry sitting on a bench outside a store, as Larry explains why his story doesn't work due to a lack of motive.
After a wild ride, a car slams into a tree and stops, the camera pans to the right, and the white picket fences "dissolve" into white bars of a jail in the next scene. There is aesthetic in these scene transitions. Some situations are misguided—Owen imagining stabbing mom with scissors in the ear is bad; Owen hiding behind a couch as Margaret has sex with her gardener could have worked if DeVito simply ditched the stupid idea of said gardener "barking" like a dog to arouse her, for some reason. The dialogue also isn't as witty as it could have been, since Larry and Owen are novelists, and is instead rather improvised and obvious. Still, the first 2/3 of the film are a lot of fun, without any 'empty walk', full of playful allusions to Hitchcock's style. Unfortunately, the final third really does not know what to do with this story—it wants to pretend that Larry will kill Owen's mom, but is ultimately too scared to go this dark route, and thus just runs around in circles, backing out, not sure what it should do. The whole last third is a giant 'copout' in slow-motion, bringing the concept to a dead end. Despite this anticlimactic finale, "Throw Momma from the Train" has so many merits in the first half, that it deserves to be seen. One little episode of an agent, played by Rob Reiner, is wonderfully cynical: "I handle writers, Larry, not artists. You go be an artist. Let the rest of the world make a living!"
Grade:++
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