Author: Karl Smallwood / Source: Today I Found Out
Dan P asks: We see in the old movies and cartoons that the villain ties their victim to the railroad tracks to kill him or her in a gruesome way thought the hero always rescues the victim in the nick of time.Are there any documented cases of someone being tied up and left to die on the railroad tracks?
A manly hero coming to the rescue of a beautiful damsel in distress has been a common trope since literally the earliest days of theater, going all the way back to the Ancient Greeks. As the centuries passed, mythical creatures were replaced by more mundane dangers- notable to the topic at hand is the common trope of top hat clad, magnificently mustachioed villains tying buxom damsels to railway tracks while a dashing hero rushes in to save the day. So where exactly did this railway trope actually come from and are there any known cases of someone actually doing this in real life?
To begin with, while your first instinct might be to assume that this trope originated during the era of silent films, this isn’t quite correct, though it is true you can find isolated examples of this in a few surviving films.
For example, the 1913 film Barney Oldfield’s Race for a Life is commonly touted as the first film to feature the “chained to a railway” scene, including a mustachioed villain wearing a fetching hat, a beguiling beauty tied to the railway tracks and a daring, last-minute rescue by a handsome hero. The thing is, this was a comedy specifically created to lampoon the trope.
In another similar example, we have the 1917 film Teddy at the Throttle in which the fair maiden, played by Gloria Swanson, humorously rescues herself from peril because the “dashing” hero arrives too late.
To find the true origin of the trope, at least in terms of what popularized it, we have to go back to stage plays, with it commonly stated that Augustin Daly’s 1867 play, Under the Gaslight by American was first. This does indeed contain such a scene, in this case where a character named Snorkey is tied to the rails by a man named Byke. As he’s doing this, Byke exclaims,
I’m going to put you to bed. You won’t toss much. In less than ten minutes you’ll be sound asleep. There, how do you like it ? You’ll get down to the Branch before me, will you? You dog me and play the eavesdropper, eh I Now do it if you can. When you hear the thunder under your head and see the lights dancing in your eyes, and feel the iron wheels a foot from your neck, remember Byke!
Thankfully for Snorkey, in a sort of reversal of the gender roles in the scene, a damsel named Laura manages to come to his rescue and free him just before the train arrives.
While, as noted, Daly is commonly given credit for coming up with the idea, it turns out this isn’t correct at all; it was simply his play that popularized it. For example, sticking with theater, if you dig a little deeper, a similar scene also appeared in a previous play called The Engineer released in 1863 in Britain.
Nevertheless the effect the scene in Daly’s play had on the audience was so…
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