Last Train to Fortune (Rifkin, 2025)

Last Train to Fortune is the second film I have watched in as many months that I didn’t actually believe I was enjoying until I got all the way through. I kept expecting it to dissolve into something more generic, for the performers to give up the ghost and start phoning it in, or for the initial momentum of the movie’s set-up to slow to a slog. Instead, it kept me guessing until the end, interested enough in how it was going to resolve its themes to keep watching. It is not the most original screenplay I have ever seen, but it showed enough attention to character development to keep me involved.

Malcolm McDowell plays Cecil Peachtree, a man who looks too old to have survived this long in the Wild West, much less to be taking a job as a school teacher. He misses the titular last train, and while waiting on the tracks gets robbed at gunpoint by Jedidiah Dooley (James Paxton). Cecil hands over his money, but he barters to try to hang onto his books. They are his livelihood and his lifeblood. He makes a deal that if Jebidiah will deliver him to Fortune, he will hand over his first month’s salary to the outlaw in exchange for getting him to his destination while he is still breathing. Jebidiah is just green enough or just wily enough –or a little bit of both — to take the old rascal up on his offer. And away they go.

Since the two men are going to be with each other a while, they figure they might as well get to know one another, and the audience gets to slowly see some details emerge around the generic edges. Cecil is not quite as dumb as the persona he plays. How could he be after a lifetime of reading the greatest books of all time? Plus, any film that champions the value of literacy needs to be able to show how these texts have positively impacted the reader. Anyone can drag his eyes across the page. (Well, almost anyone, there may occasionally be those who are illiterate mingling among us.) Reading for understanding, engaging with what you are reading is a different matter entirely.

Jedidiah is neither as mean as he presents himself to be nor as dumb as a dumber movie would make him. That’s an important point. We’ve seen scores of this basic scenario — a person with a gun and another with only his wits. Too often the writers even the score by making the battle of wits a mismatch. Last Train to Fortune, though, understands that there is a difference between being unread and being an idiot.

It’s worth pointing out, too, that Cecil is not just playing a game of mental manipulation with an adversary with a gun. He fancies himself an educator, in a battle with fate or fortune for the mind and soul of the human being holding the gun — one who might turn into something if he could be genuinely persuaded that he has the internal resources to survive without a firearm. Or perhaps that is part of Cecil’s gambit. Maybe he sees in Jebediah the longing to be something more and is shrewd enough to exploit that youth’s insecurity.

McDowell is perhaps the perfect choice to play Cecil, not because the part demands something no other actor could provide but because his very familiarity creates a mask of ambiguity that the film is able to exploit. According to my last search of IMDB, McDowell has over two hundred and eighty confirmed film and television roles. He has never been nominated for an Academy Award, and the role for which he is most famous is over five decades in the past. A perusal of his filmmography finds notable and memorable successes mixed in with crazy titles like Robot Dracula, Death Race 2050, Mississippi Murder, and Kids vs. Monsters. His very presence simultaneously elevates Last Train to Fortune while lowering expectations for it. Hand to heart, I don’t mean that as a slight, he’s been great as recently as The Panic (2025), Bombshell (2019) and Mozart in the Jungle (2018). If his availability and willingness to work make him easy to typecast in the malevolent old guy, I will never blame an actor for accepting a paycheck. The point I am trying to make here, is that typical McDowell typecasting works to the film’s advantage here, because the film works best when we aren’t entirely sure who is pretending to be something they are not. I am honestly not sure if this film works with Anthony Hopkins or Clint Eastwood or Robert DeNiro or some other salty senior, since their presence would invite assumptions that there must be more to Cecil that a B-movie western demands in order to justify their presence.

If I can risk another compliment that I mean sincerely but I fear will be taken as backhanded, Jedidiah may be the harder of the two lead roles to play credibly. Last Train to Fortune requires Cecil to be self-efffacing, to not know he is the star. Cecil has to gently persuade Jedidiah with hints and suggests, not the sheer force of personality. Jedidiah needs to let his guard down gradually, not all at once at the end. For that to happen, the script needs to be a lot more patient than movies of this ilk usually are, and its star must be confident enough to be self-effacing, to cede the limelight at the appropriate times in realization that the other character’s arc is the more dramatic and more interesting. McDowell is able to do that. He never once mugs at the camera or winks at the audience with one of those knowing, “can you believe I am in this movie” deliveries dripping with self-aware irony. His moderation allows Paxton to not have to try to match him roar for roar in a role that needs him to dial things back a little so as to not become caricature. Both leads are terrific, and the supporting cast is as well. I particularly enjoyed a scene with a Native American whose knowledge of Thoreau and taste in literature made me smile.

Last Train to Fortune strikes me as destined for the long tail sooner rather than later, but with any luck its life there will be long. It’s exactly the sort of film that people will run across on some streaming platform three years from now, watch on a whim based on the cast list, and end up saying to their partner, “You know that was pretty enjoyable, I wonder why I don’t remember it ever coming out in the theater.”