The Wrong Track

Walt Hoban’s one-reel oddity, The Wrong Track, compresses the American pastoral into a Sisyphean gag: a chugging steam locomotive—its brass gleaming like a newly-minted myth—meets a solitary, moon-pie-faced cow planted athwart the rails, a bovine monolith that refuses the laws of momentum, commerce, Manifest Destiny itself. Engineer Jerry (Hoban) vaults from the cab, semaphore flag wilting, and proceeds through a litany of escalating stratagems—whistle blasts like Gabriel’s trumpet, bribes of sweet alfalfa, a Chaplinesque tap dance of frustration—each rendered futile by the cow’s vegetal stoicism. The landscape, all ochre dust and bruised sky, watches like a passive deity while micro-dramas flare in the passenger cars: a honeymooning bride counts rosary beads, a drummer counts lost commissions, a boy sketches the beast as if to fix the cosmos’ absurdity in graphite. When the sun sinks to a blood-orange wafer, the train backs away in inglorious retreat, whistle now a lullaby of defeat; the cow remains, tail flicking at cosmic jokes, the tracks stretching empty toward a horizon that suddenly feels theoretical. In that razor-thin slice of celluloid, Hoban stages a deadpan elegy for progress, a prairie parable where the Great American Machine is checkmated by cud-chewing imperturbability, and the only forward motion is the viewer’s dawning recognition that history itself might be stuck on an endless siding.