The Big Smoke

The Underground on film
From alien spaceships to female scorpians, American werewolves and Woody Harrelson - the world's underground train lines have played host to numerous onscreen oddities. Time Out judges the world's tubes on film.

Claim to fame
How did a New York train driver lose a train on the subway for seven years? Here's our tales and legends of the world's subterranean railways.

Cheapest fare
So where's the most expensive place in the world to travel by tube? We wonder...

Deepest station
At almost 100 meters below sea level where is the world's deepest tube station?

Stations
Which city in the world boasts the most tube stations?

Year of constrcution
Built in 1863 London's tube system was the envy of the world, but which city was the next to follow suit?

Paris © Oliver Knight

On film
London
There are horrors down there, including alien spaceships (‘Quatermass and the Pit’, 1967) and sleeping dragons (‘Reign of Fire’, 2002). In ‘Death Line’ (1972), Donald Pleasence finds in-bred, plague-ridden cannibals and Tottenham Court Road is in John Landis’ ‘An American Werewolf in London’ (1981). Franka Potente discovers the dangers of the last train home in ‘Creep’ (2004) and director Ben Hopkins views commuters as zombies in ‘The Nine Lives of Tomas Katz’ (2000).

Tokyo
‘Female Prisoner Scorpion: Beast Stable’ (1973) opens with two policemen trying to arrest ‘Scorpion’ Kaji Meiko on the Tokyo subway – she slashes one and hacks an arm off the other. No such revenge is exacted on the middle-aged man who gropes women in packed carriages in ‘Tandem’ (1994), an example of the notorious Japanese ‘pink’ genre.

Berlin
Franka Potente (again) has to raise 100,000 marks in 20 minutes in Tom Tykwer’s ‘Run Lola Run’ (1998), so has to descend into the U-Bahn to make up time. ‘Möbius 17’ (2005) sees trains vanish into a parallel universe.

Budapest
There’s not a lot on Moscow’s tubes, but similar Eastern Bloc lines do crop up on film. The Hungarian capital’s Metro system is seen as a Kafka-esque bureaucracy of confusion and farce in ‘Kontroll’ (2003), a series of tales involving a group of benign ticket inspectors.

Paris
No country has taken its underground system so much to heart as France – from Georges Franju in 1958 (‘The First Night’) through to Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s ‘Amélie’ (2001). Perhaps the ultimate ‘underground’ film is 1985’s ‘Subway’, where director Luc Besson spices his unlikely romance with chases, shoot-outs, comedy, and even a musical feel. Christopher Lambert encounters a hidden world of rollerskating crooks, bodybuilders and pop wannabes.

New York
The subway is about dirty dealing and suspense. Walter Matthau is the cop trying to sort out a subway hijacking in ‘The Taking of Pelham One Two Three’ (1974); later,Wesley Snipes and Woody Harrelson decide to steal the transit authority’s weekly takings in ‘Money Train’ (1995). In the ’90s it was the site for the thrills of ‘Speed’ (1994) and ‘Die Hard: With a Vengeance’ (1995), but one moment is still touted as the best chase in cinema history: the race between train and car (under the raised BMT West End Line) in ‘The French Connection’ (1971).

Glasgow
Its ‘Clockwork Orange’ nickname is not related to Kubrick’s film (it’s because the line runs in a circle, and the carriages are orange), and we couldn’t find a notable cinematic outing here. It does appear in the novel ‘Espedair Street’ by Iain Banks as the setting for the a pub crawl in which characters consume a whisky and a half of ‘Heavy’ at every stop.

London © Susie Rea

Claim to fame
London
The tube’s longevity makes for plenty of interesting historical facts. Gladstone and Dr Bernado are the only people who have ever had their coffins transported by tube, and Northfields station was the first in the world to use kestrels and hawks to kill pigeons in order to stop them setting up homes in the station.

Tokyo
Haruki Murakami’s ‘Underground: The Tokyo Gas Attack and the Japanese Psyche’, a non-fiction account of the deadly Tokyo subway gas attack in 1995, features interviews with the survivors says as much about Japanese society as it did about the attack itself.

Paris
The Métro boasts miles of tunnels under the city, including former Roman quarries. In 2004 police discovered a cavern that had been converted into a restaurant and working cinema.

New York
In 1933, the ‘AA’ train operating between 207th Street and Hudson Terminal Two was taken out of service. The motorman taking the last train was heading for the depot. He was new to the job, got lost, parked it in the wrong depot, and went on holiday the next day. The train wasn’t discovered until 1940.

Moscow
According to legend, Soviet engineers approached Stalin in the ’30s to update him on plans for the Metro. The despot put his coffee cup down on the centre of the blueprints, then left in silence. The planners saw the brown circle the cup had left, and realised what they were missing: a ring line round the centre!

Berlin
The erecting of the Berlin Wall in 1961 made for a Cold War transport dilemma. The U-Bahn Line 2 was split into Eastern and Western sections, and the north-south lines ran through the so-called Geisterbahnhöfe (ghost stations) in East Berlin without stopping.

Glasgow
An alternative nickname supposedly given to the route in the ’50s was Sputnik, because it took the same time to navigate (actually 24 minutes to complete the circular route) as the Soviet satellite took to whizz round the Earth.


Cheapest fare

£4
London Underground

€2,20 (£1.49)
Berlin Untergrundbahn

£1
Glasgow Subway

$2 (£1)
New York City Subway

€1.40 (95p)
Métro de Paris

160 yen (70p)
Tokyo Subway

7 roubles (35p)
Moscow Metro


Deepest station

Stations

Year of constuction