The Train (1964) Let's get right to the point here. We don't want to wait till the end of the review to hand out the rating.
Right now, BQ tells you this is a 5 star (*****) all-time great. One of our favorite World War 2 movies and one of the most visually spectacular.
What's sad......no studio or director in this day and age would ever attempt a film like this without their hundreds upon hundreds of CGI digital artists.
All the action sequences in "The Train" are filmed live on set. Explosions, incredible train crashes....and the lead actors performing their own stunts.
More importantly, everything that goes into making a truly great movie is plainly on view here.....the acting, story, composition of shots for maximum dramatic impact.
In short, everything that's missing from a superhero movie.
Paris 1944 - the occupying Germans are on the verge of fleeing the city as Allied forces invade Europe. Ruthless Nazi Col. Von Waldheim (Paul Scofield) an imperious art-loving dilettante, plans to transport all of France's cherished classic paintings back to Germany.
Putting the paintings on a train puts Von Waldheim in the path of French railroad inspector Labiche (Burt Lancaster). He forces Labiche to personally engineer the train.....a double-edged sword of a job, since Labiche has already been tasked by the Resistance to thwart the train's passage to Berlin without destroying the paintings.
From this point the film becomes a gripping duel of wills and reckless one-upsmanship between the two men, while Allied air raids wreak explosive damage to trains and the railyards. And that's not all that collides.......
Director John Frankenheimer, given access to real trains and tracks, stages some of the most eye-popping action sequences (and stunning train crashes) ever committed to film. But he never forgets this is a human story, with drama scenes done with carefully composed shots that feature Lancaster in the foreground and the supporting cast alongside reacting to him.
The incendiary issue that drives the film never gets lost in all the action.....Labiche agonizes over whether all the lives sacrificed to save the the paintings justifies the carnage. And Frankenheimer hammers this point home in the film's final shots, leaving it to the audience to decide.
We could easily go on and on for another few hours about how much we love this movie, so we'll wrap it up with a recommendation that no cinema buff should dare miss "The Train".
Again, we say 5 stars (*****). If you haven't seen it, stop everything you're doing and seek it out. Right now.
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