Paul Scofield stars as a Nazi officer in the waning days of the French occupation. We first see him plundering a Paris museum, loading crates full of Renoirs, Gauguins, Cezannes and Van Goghs to be shipped to the Fatherland before the Allies\u2019 imminent arrival. The German high command has little interest in such degenerate art beyond the obvious cash value, but Scofield\u2019s Colonel Von Waldheim fancies himself an aesthete. He\u2019s obsessed with the paintings, to a point where he continues to fret over securing their safe passage even as there are more important matters he and his retreating army really should be worrying about instead. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Lancaster\u2019s Labiche has never had much time for fine art. A French railway station master and Resistance saboteur par excellence, he thinks it\u2019s mad for a man to risk his life over a few lousy paintings, especially when the damn war is almost over, anyway. But much to Labiche\u2019s consternation, his colleagues all rally around the cause. Hoping to rescue \u201cthe great cultural history of France,\u201d nearly a hundred men join the scheme to delay, disrupt, reroute and generally do everything their ragtag organization can to keep Von Waldheim\u2019s precious cargo from crossing the border into Germany. It\u2019s inspired by a real-life story in which the French bogged down the train\u2019s departure in bureaucratic red tape. But for the sake of a Hollywood movie, brawnier methods had to be invented. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Still, The Train<\/em> wasn\u2019t always supposed to be this big. Original director Arthur Penn envisioned it as more of a psychological battle between Von Waldheim and Labiche. Producer-star Lancaster fired him three days into shooting, bringing in his buddy Frankenheimer to up the ante on the action. The two had recently teamed three times in as many years for The Young Savages<\/em>, Birdman of Alcatraz<\/em> and Seven Days in May<\/em>, but neither had ever attempted anything on the sheer scale of The Train<\/em>, for which the director and his simpatico star kept improvising and adding spectacle sequences. (That whole extended bit about driving the train in a circle back to France under the Nazis\u2019 noses was something they came up with on the set.) What was supposed to be a 14-week assignment for Frankenheimer ended up lasting a year. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Tom Cruise before Tom Cruise, Burt Lancaster was a circus acrobat and trapeze artist who loved inserting insanely dangerous stunts for himself into his projects. The Train<\/em> features some of his most astonishing physical feats, as when he shimmies down a ladder, then runs and jumps aboard a moving train in a single, unbroken shot, or an even more eye-popping gag that finds the star sliding straight down the face of a steep, mountainside cliff. Few actors ever moved with such grace, and it\u2019s a wonder to watch the then 51-year-old star vaulting himself over fences and atop boxcars with the agility of an athlete half his age. (When Frankenheimer was displeased with how a French stuntman performed a day-player\u2019s plummet from a roof, Lancaster suited up in the guy\u2019s costume and took the fall himself.) <\/p>\n\n\n\n Amusingly enough, the only injury during the entire shoot happened on the star\u2019s day off, when Lancaster blew out his knee playing golf. Frankenheimer added a scene in which Labiche takes a bullet in the leg to justify his limp, not the first such improvisation required during this arduous, extended production. If The Train<\/em> seems to have a more disposable supporting cast than one is accustomed to in films from the era, that\u2019s because a lot of these French actors had hard stop dates for prior commitments in other projects. The director liked to joke about how whenever they ran out of time with a particular performer, he\u2019d line \u2018em up against a wall to get shot by the Nazis and assign the rest of their business to somebody else. It\u2019s an expedient measure but also an unnerving result in the final film. Death comes swiftly in The Train<\/em>, and without warning.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Because this is a Frankenheimer movie, the lenses are wide and the angles low. Objects and faces loom leviathan-like in the foregrounds while backgrounds bustle with activity. The high-speed black-and-white film stock allowed cinematographers Jean Tournier and Walter Wottiz to keep everything in focus all the way back to the horizon, and each frame is crammed with busybody extras, groaning machinery and grinding gears. Frankenheimer\u2019s camera fluidly moves in and out of windows, always integrating interiors and exteriors to remind you that you\u2019re not looking at something that\u2019s been staged on a set. Even when you are.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The Train<\/em> is the kind of movie that takes the time to show you how things work. You can\u2019t really enjoy the sabotage without knowing beforehand what\u2019s being saboteur-ed, and luckily Lancaster was one of those actors who insisted on spending weeks learning how to repair railroad bearings by himself or set a plastique explosive bomb on his own. Not for any wacky Jared Leto \u201cMethod\u201d reasons, but rather because as a showman, he understood that the more convincingly he performed these tasks on camera, the more we in the audience would buy into the movie\u2019s verisimilitude, especially when Frankenheimer wasn\u2019t constantly having to cut away to a double\u2019s hands doing all the intricate work. <\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cMen want to be heroes and their widows mourn,\u201d sighs an innkeeper played by Jeanne Moreau. The central dilemma of The Train<\/em> is provocatively never resolved, leaving Scofield\u2019s Nazi aesthete furious to find his plans foiled by these railway workers, these everyday fucking proles, who have no appreciation for the art with which he wishes to abscond. \u201cA painting means as much to you as a string of pearls to an ape,\u201d he hisses at Labiche, who remains unsurprisingly unmoved. The question of whether or not this was worth it is left to the audience, witnessing a pile of bodies strewn beside some of European history\u2019s greatest masterworks. <\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cWhen all this is over, we should probably go look at some of those paintings,\u201d says one of Labiche\u2019s buddies earlier in the picture. Pity he never got the chance.\u00a0 “The Train” is now streaming on Amazon Prime Video<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/04\/the-train1-1024x576.jpg\")
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