Burt Lancaster, Paul Scofield, Jeanne Moreau.
Written by Franklin Coen, Frank Davis.
Directed by John Frankenheimer.
A virtually non-stop action film for people who don’t find that genre in-compatible with character and ideas, The Train combines unrelenting suspense with thorny questions about the enduring value of art, of a nation’s heritage … and of human life.
World War II is coming to an end in Europe, and after five years, the liberation of Paris is at hand. The Nazis are in full retreat, but one aristocratic officer, Colonel Van Waldheim, refuses to leave without taking the priceless art of France with him: Renoirs and Degas, Gauguins and Picassos, Van Goghs and Manets. He has them all packed and shipped on the last train out of the country.
Museum curators beg the French Resistance to stop the theft – but after years of fighting occupying Germans, the patriots are physically and spiritually exhausted … and down to a handful of men. Their leader, Labiche, a railroad engineer, knows exactly how dangerous stopping the train will be, and he’s not at all willing to lose the few friends he has left to save paintings, no matter how rare or famous they are.
Others, though, see the challenge differently – as an opportunity to salvage the shattered soul of their nation, to restore its battered dignity, to reclaim “the glory of France.” For all his doubts, Labiche is compelled to help them, and quickly finds himself drawn into a battle of wits with the canny, brutal, and increasingly obsessed Van Waldheim.
Amid the whirl of desperate ploys and frantic choices, Labiche and his cohorts are engulfed by relentless, unanswerable questions. Is a painting – are a dozen or a hundred – worth a human life? At a critical moment, Allied forces hold back from sweeping into Paris, to give the French army the honor of marching in first. Is such a political gesture worth the corresponding sacrifice of men, women, and children?
And the question that repeatedly surfaces, as more and more ordinary people find themselves risking these bold gambles against impossible odds: what makes any person choose to deliberately lay down his or her life? Duty? Vengeance? Devotion to country? The simple hope that tomorrow might be better than today?
“Beauty,” Van Waldheim says, “belongs to the man who can appreciate it.” Whatever questions it raises, this story leaves us profoundly appreciative of the beauty of sacrifice.
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