Quartile rating: 8/10 · 1 rating
As the Allied forces approach Paris in August 1944, German Colonel Von Waldheim is desperate to take all of France's greatest paintings to Germany. He manages to secure a train to transport the valuable art works even as the chaos of retreat descends upon them. The French resistance however wants to stop them from stealing their national treasures but have received orders from London that they are not to be destroyed. The station master, Labiche, is tasked with scheduling the train and making it all happen smoothly but he is also part of a dwindling group of resistance fighters tasked with preventing the theft. He and others stage an elaborate ruse to keep the train from ever leaving French territory.
The Train is a superbly crafted WWII thriller elevated by Burt Lancaster's commanding physical performance and John Frankenheimer's extraordinary practical direction — real locomotives are crashed and destroyed on camera with jaw-dropping black-and-white cinematography that gives the film a visceral, documentary-like authenticity. Paul Scofield's icy Von Waldheim is a memorable antagonist. The plot is solid but essentially a cat-and-mouse chase structure, competent rather than complex. The ending is appropriately bleak and morally ambiguous — bodies strewn amid the rescued art — but its abruptness may feel more deflating than profound. Novelty is moderate; the film perfects the practical action-thriller template and its thematic tension between art's value and human life is genuinely interesting, but the overall shape is familiar wartime resistance fare.