"The Guns Of Navarone" (1961) set the template for all subsequent such films.....throw in a mix of American and British soldiers at odds with each other as they face impossible odds and thousands of German troops. Ambitious in scope and filled with ferocious machine gun battles and bursting grenades, these films flourished until more or less coming to end with 1969's "Where Eagles Dare", appropriately, like 'Narvarone' also based on an Alaistair MacLean story. (By that we mean that 'Where Eagles Dare' was the last of these war adventures to take itself seriously......coming in its wake: a uneven variety of attempts to turn this genre on its head with comedy or anti-war satire....)
"Von Ryan's Express", sturdy, suspenseful, and bestowed with the star power of Frank Sinatra, ably acquits itself as a standard meat 'n potatoes Studio war movie. It rarely rises above efficient, in its competent direction by Mark Robson and its punch-the-time-clock performance by Sinatra......but that's all anyone ever expected in these l960's war adventures.
Sinatra plays Ryan, an Army air corp colonel who, after crash landing in Italy, finds himself the top ranking officer among the Americans and Brits in the Italian POW camp he's thrown into. This doesn't sit well with the Stiff Upper Brit, Major Fincham (Trevor Howard) who commands the UK forces and most definitely resents Ole Blue Eyes taking charge.....
Frank crisply barks out orders in his spare dialogue......in which you can sense Sinatra's legendary impatience with spending any long amount of time making a movie. After the Italians desert the POW camp, Ryan's leniency in dealing with the camp's Fascist commander comes back to haunt him.... leading to more POWs killed and the rest of the prisoners recaptured by the German army. Fincham and the men bitterly dub Ryan as 'Von Ryan', blaming his too humane decisions for their predicament.
That key plot point could have been the basis for no end of blistering, confrontational scenes...... but it's not really on this movie's agenda, so if you're expecting the kind of Gregory Peck/David Niven dramatic fireworks that enlivened "Guns Of Navarone", forget it. The film briskly moves on to its next set of breathless escapes and besides, Sinatra looks like he's already checking his watch for the next flight back to Vegas.....
Sinatra, Howard and company next hijack and commandeer the Italian train the Germans are transporting them on.......and so begins the film's main event, a tense hide-and-seek. cat-and-mouse duel as our Allied escapees attempt to sneak an entire train past the pursuing Germans, hoping to divert it into Switzerland and freedom.
Great rousing stuff happens at the end...(this is one of the few 60's movies where that beautifully rendered artwork illustration in the poster actually mirrors a scene from the film). Frank and the gang, apparently only a few yards from the Swiss border, have to battle it out with German troops and Luftwaffe dive bombers.....(and yes, you'll have to forgive the now primitive blue-screen special effects process they had to use to pull this off......but on the other hand, that's no CGI train. Back then, movies still employed real ones...)
We couldn't help wishing Sinatra gave a little than casual commitment to the role....but hey. that was Frank, who at his point in his career, coasted through his films like they were airports where he had temporary layovers. Thankfully his walk-through performance doesn't slow down "Von Ryan's Express"......Frank, Trevor and our Allied boys (including a very young James Brolin) do a bang up job making this train run on time. 3 stars (***) for another 1940's war caper as seen through 1960's color and wide screen....
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