EXTRA: What a crash!!!

I realize it was mere fiction. But there’s a part of me that, every time I’m in Chicago’s Union Station, wants to go find the spot where the train locomotive crashed its way off the tracks and into the station lobby in the film “Silver Streak.”

That 1976 film was the first of several that paired up the duo of comedian Richard Pryor with actor Gene Wilder. Its storyline of Wilder’s character seeing a murder occur on a Los Angeles-to-Chicago passenger train is a bit ridiculous. But the two did show a natural pairing that was enhanced four years later in “Stir Crazy.”

AND YOU HAVE to admit, that finale scene of the train crash into the lobby is something you don’t forget. That and something like the scene in “Running Scared” where we see bags of cocaine being dumped all over the floor of the Thompson Center state government building – thereby upsetting a youthful actor Jimmy Smits who played the heavy in that particular film? Yet another image that pops into my head every time I have reason to set foot in the state building.

Along with that old Mount Prospect squad car jumping over the 95th Street bridge in "The Blues Brothers," that would be a "top three" in my mind. It’s scary that some of the images of Chicago that stick most closely in my head are things that never really happened – even though I can picture every lasting detail.

Anyway, all these images are what popped into my head when I learned Tuesday of the death this week of Wilder -- whose career may well extend beyond those films he made with Peoria native Pryor. Particularly that train crash!

Yet they are among the bits of cinema that I truly can never tire of, finding myself stopping to watch them anytime I happen to be flipping through the mass of channels of programming we now have to pick from and stumble across them.

Beat that scene for a film finale!

  -30-

Altering evidence? Or preserving pieces of a crime scene? That is the question

A civil court jury in Cook County found it within itself to clear the county sheriff’s police of wrongdoing in the way it handled the body of a 20-year-old woman who was killed five years ago in a car crash in the forest preserves near suburban Oak Forest.


That ruling in Cook County Circuit Court came on Friday, and I’m going to have to respect the judgment because I wasn’t there during the civil trial to hear every bit of evidence for myself.

BUT I HAVE to admit that reading the reports that came from the trial make me wonder about the logic of what was repeatedly called police “protocol” to justify the way the cops handled the scene.

This particular lawsuit wound up getting coverage because the woman killed in the auto accident wound up being stripped partially naked when photographers taking pictures of the scene as possible evidence in future criminal proceedings.

The girl’s mother seems to feel her daughter was violated by such acts, particularly since the fact wound up spurring rumors that the girl was somehow naked and having sex at the time of the car crash.

As it turned out, the driver of the vehicle tried claiming the girl was straddling him at the time – claiming that was what caused him to lose control of the vehicle.

BUT INVESTIGATORS WERE able to show that it was impossible for any such act to have occurred. Meaning the driver, himself, was to blame for losing control of the vehicle. He wound up being found guilty of criminal charges and is now serving a prison sentence. The photographs that were the focus of this lawsuit were supposedly key evidence in gaining his conviction.

Sheriff’s police claimed during the trial that their investigators were merely following the standard procedure for gathering up a crime scene (which is what the accident site near 147^th Street and Oak Park Avenue had become). Since crime scenes are never pretty and often garish, it is only inevitable that the evidence would be less than proper.

I don’t doubt that those crime scene photographers wind up seeing grotesque images that would wind up bothering the sensibilities of the deceased’s relatives.

But I never did read anyone explaining just why some of the photographs of the accident scene wound up showing the girl fully-clothed, and others showed her body moved to a tarp placed on the open ground where she was then stripped partially nude.

MY GUT REACTION is to wonder why this wasn’t construed as tampering with a crime scene – somehow altering the reality of what was there. No clear explanation was ever provided that I am aware of, and now I doubt that one ever will.

Not that it seemed to bother the jury that spent a good chunk of the day on Friday resolving the testimony they heard during all of last week. They seem to want to believe the police behaved professionally. Then again, some people will always argue on behalf of the police, no matter how extreme the evidence against them seems to be.

That is the verdict reached by a jury of peers, and it is what will remain as the outcome of this case – unless someone wants to try taking this to the Illinois appeals court and can come up with a specific bit of evidence that was wrongly excluded during the lawsuit’s trial.

After all, merely not liking a jury’s verdict is insufficient reason to justify granting an appeal.

PERHAPS THE MOTHER realizes that, since I read in newspaper accounts during the weekend that she is pleased she was able to publicly say her daughter wasn’t having sex or being naked or doing anything else that might be considered sordid at the time of her death.

For her sake, I hope she is capable of getting on with her life – which for the past five years and for the remainder of it will be without her daughter.

No amount of money that she might have received from Cook County as a financial reward from her lawsuit would have brought her daughter back.

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Here I thought I was watching a Chicago-themed mediocre movie, not Holy scripture

It has become something of a running gag throughout the years between my brother, Chris, and I.

We’ll pass by a church, or by anybody or anything, that is a combination of religious and either flamboyant or garish.

TO WHICH I will tell my brother, “you could use a little churching up.”

To which he will (without a doubt) respond, “I don’t want to listen to no jive-ass preacher talking to me about Heaven and Hell.”

No, we’re not really talking about the merits of theology (if anything, it would be somebody telling me I need some “churching up”). Nor are we in any serious philosophical engagement.

We’re just doing a riff off of a 30-year-old film that people of a certain mental composition want to elevate into a cinematic classic, while others will view it is as overbloated mess.

WE’RE TALKING, OF course, about “The Blues Brothers,” which took the musical characters created by John Belushi and Dan Aykroyd on Saturday Night Live and used them as the basis of a two hour-plus film that told the story of how Jake and Elwood Blues went to wild, wacky and crazed extremes to raise the $5,000 needed to pay that year’s property tax assessment on the orphanage where they had been raised.

That particular scene my brother and I do comes just after Jake and Elwood are chased down the stairs by a yardstick-wielding nun who is disgusted at what religious reprobates her two former charges have become.

Cab Calloway’s “Curtis” character was the one telling Belushi’s “Jake” to “get to church.” When he finally does show up, he gets to hear James Brown’s “Rev. Cleophus James” character sing and dance and we learn that, “Jesus H. Tap-Dancing Christ. I have seen the light!”

Somehow, when I first saw this film, I never thought I was seeing anything significant. I thought I was seeing a film with an overbloated storyline (although a wonderful R ‘n’ B soundtrack album that I still own, both in LP and compact disc form) that ran too long (although I understand what I saw in the theaters was a version edited from the Belushi/Aykroyd version that would have required an intermission midway through).

BUT NOW, THE Catholic Church seems to think we’re seeing something significant. The Vatican’s newspaper, L’Osservatore Romano (the so-called employer of another Saturday Night Live character, Father Guido Sarducci, who supposedly was the paper’s gossip columnist), published a series recently about Catholic references within pop culture.

The newspaper included “The Blues Brothers” as a film with a Catholic message.

I never realized that naming the yardstick-wielding nun Sister Mary Stigmata or that constantly having the lead characters declare themselves to be “on a mission from God” was enough to get the blessing of the sort-of official newspaper of Pope Benedict XVI.

Perhaps it was the pictures in the background of then-new Pope John Paul II that did the trick. I doubt it was the sound of legendary bass player Donald “Duck” Dunn uttering two of the crudest, yet most memorable, lines in cinematic history.

NOT THAT I think many of the film’s fans were all that interested in what the Pope or his advisors thought about the film. Probably no more so than all those Beatles fans who learned months ago through the newspaper that the Catholic Church has “forgiven” them for leading many of our society into that counter-cultural mass that many of us associate with the 1960s.

But now we have church approval to be able to watch the film that showed us “Illinois Nazis” suffering a deadly fate when their car drove off a highway ramp under construction – then suddenly managed to soar through the air high over the Hancock Building (all 1,127 feet of it) before crashing through the pavement of the street below.

Personally, what I find memorable about “The Blues Brothers” (and the reason why I occasionally dig out the DVD I own of the film) is the fact that Belushi used his sense of Chicago (he was a Wheaton native) to include scenes shot in neighborhoods that film crews usually wouldn’t venture into – and some of which no longer exist.

The old skid row on Van Buren Street in the south Loop, and the decrepit Trailways bus station that used to be in the north Loop. The Dixie Square shopping center in suburban Harvey (which never looked that good when it was really open for retail). The Chez Paul restaurant (“Mayor Daley no longer dines here. He’s dead, sir”) and the Joliet Correctional Center in the same film.

IT ALSO GAVE the 95th Street Bridge over the Calumet River that separates the South Chicago and East Side neighborhoods its moment of cinematic glory. Nobody who passes over that bridge today can help but wonder how it was physically possible for a broken-down former Mount Prospect police car to jump the width of the bridge while its trusses were opening.

Perhaps it was a religious miracle – one that would make “The Blues Brothers” worthy of its religious recognition now being received.

-30-

This may be an older version of the 95th Street Bridge (the current one dates to 1958), but it isn't too hard to envision a battered old automobile trying to make the leap.