Back to the Future Part III

The strangest production story in the trilogy belongs here. For the lynching scene Michael J. Fox stood on a crate through the first two takes; when Zemeckis judged the struggle too choreographed, Fox dropped it and held the rope off his throat with his fingers. On the third attempt he misplaced his hand, the rope closed on his carotid artery, and he hung unconscious while the cameras kept running. In his memoir Lucky Man he notes Zemeckis took a while to conclude he was not simply acting that well. The film itself is a change of balance. The time machine is broken for nearly the whole running time, so this is a western against a deadline rather than a time travel puzzle, and the comedy shifts with it: instead of altering a variable and watching the consequence, everything turns on getting a car with no petrol up to eighty eight miles an hour. Doc takes the romantic lead and Marty recedes after the midpoint. The finale was shot at Railtown 1897 in Jamestown with a real steam locomotive. For: anyone finishing the trilogy who likes a climax built on practical railway work. Not for: viewers expecting the overlapping timelines of the second film, since this one runs on a single line and moves slower.