Forget ocean liners. Hitchcock knew that trains were the best moving setting for a thriller—classy yet democratic, speedy yet relaxed, big...yet claustrophobic when you’re on the run. Here are some train movies worth running to catch:

Sleeping Car To Trieste—A spy double-crosses his colleagues, and then they all end up on the train together. Every time you think you know where this 1948 British thriller is going, it pulls the rug out from under you and its chesspiece-characters... all the way to a real jawdropper of an ending.

The Narrow Margin—Cement-mixer-voiced Charles McGraw (above) is the cop escorting Mob witness Marie Windsor (one of those B movie actresses who looks like she’s in her lingerie even fully dressed)—but there’s a twist here that proves that people were using low-rent stars for their icon value decades before Quentin Tarantino discovered Pam Grier and Robert Forster.

The Train—Burt Lancaster is the French Resistance leader trying to blow up a German train—which we know is full of looted Picassos and Van Goghs. Class actors like Paul Scofield and gritty black and white location filming make this 1965 thriller a James Bond movie that wants to be Schindler’s List.

Read other Video Rec-O!s: Next

Go to Char-broiled Food For Thought