"Festival Express - a film review" by Hawking A. Lugey

Festival Express is a movie made by cobbling together new interviews with concert and offstage footage of a three-city Canadian tour from 1970. It is one of the best concert films ever made, perfectly balancing the beautifully shot, 34 year-old performance footage from the three shows with present-day interviews of organizers and performers. Of course it doesn't hurt that the lineup consisted of prime-time Grateful Dead, The Band, Buddy Guy, Janis Joplin and other 60s and 70s stalwarts.
Using a Woodstock-like split screen for much of the film, the story centers on the cross-Canada train the promoters rented for the shows. The promoters realized early in the tour that the shows would lose money -- watch as Bobby Weir sounds eerily unchanged from then-to-now as he criticizes the protesters who ruined the tour's financial success by demanding and getting free performances -- so they decided to swallow the loss and keep the party going on the jam-saturated train. The many hair-raising performances are topped by the sheer emotional intensity of Joplin's "Cry Baby", but a young-looking Jerry Garcia comes off as the premier musician, from acoustic jams with members of The Band to electric blues boogie with The Buddy Guy Band.
Perhaps the best tribute to the tour is Joplin's insistence that the promoters join her onstage before her last set to accept her gifts of a model train and a case of tequila, the train to help them remember the tour and tequila to keep the party going. This is the movie which best shows the vibe most people associate with Woodstock or the Monterey Pop Festival but, as all the performers insist, reached its zenith during the Festival Express.