THE TRAIN

Melville once ventured, "No great and enduring volume can ever be written on the flea, though many there be who have tried it." Even when the flea is photographed in Technicolor and CinemaScope, its volume is a flashy but transitory offering. Melville dealt with whales, consequently.

Unlike most of the flea-marketeers of Hollywood, director John Frankenheimer is a man who would deal with whales, had he his choice. It is the choice of the louse as opposed to the air-breather. And in so doing, his sphere of attention becomes more cerebral, the purview of his cinematic documents ceases to be merely entertainment (which is that matter lightly dropped on the viewer, like tapioca pudding, e.g., Doris Day flicks) and becomes "art" (which entails active participation and, like a steak, mastication).

The Train is art, and as a result, many things can be said of it, not the least of which is that it is a good picture. In fact, it may be too good for the people who will eventually decide whether or not it is successful, at the box office. This is, I feel, a sin not of the producer, but of the culture, of the motion picture—goer. In the main, he has been surfeited with such an endless glut of pap films—usually because these were the ones he patronized most in the past, thus by his attentions demanding more of the same, and getting no better than he deserved—that a film of some depth and contrast leaves him confused and disgruntled; and rather than acknowledging that his imaginative faculties have atrophied, as with Lord Jim, Dr. Strangelove and half a hundred other superlative films, he will condemn the work set before him. It is a hideous conceit.

And I fear The Train will be another victim.

Behind and beside me in the theater, during the special screening, safe in the dark to express remarks of denseness and silliness that a lighted room would either force them to rationalize as "opinions" or keep unspoken, I heard typical moviegoers ask each other what the hell was going on up there, at points in the film any relatively cogent and informed person should have found self-explanatory. Again, I assert, this is not the fault of Frankenheimer & Co. but of The Great Unwashed (a term of surpassing arrogance and disdain I have hesitated to use before, but which seems frighteningly applicable here). And the answer to the problem is beyond me: the filmmaker can either pander to this Howdy Doody mentality, and bring forth an endless stream of Fanny Hurst/Gidget/Tammy/Ross Hunter charades, or go his way as has Frankenheimer or Kubrick or Richardson and woo his own Muse, letting the stock options fall where they may.

The latter course is one of courage, for it entails risk, loss of financing, and the roar of corporation executives. It is to Frankenheimer's eternal credit that he did not take the easy way out for, to repeat, The Train is a work of brilliance, perceptivity, depth and meaning. It approaches questions of morality and conscience that demand grappling. In short, this film, unlike much of what makes money these seasons, does not pass through the viewer like beets through a baby's backside.

Set in Paris, 1944, with the Allies always just "a few days away from liberation" of the open city, a small group of French Resistance operatives set themselves the task of rescuing a trainload of art treasures, masterpieces, "the heritage of France," from being shipped to Germany by the Nazi Colonel who has, for four years, pathologically kept the paintings from being damaged, ostensibly because they are convertible to gold needed for the war effort, but in reality because he is a man possessed of taste and discrimination, a man awed by the genius unleashed on those canvases by Matisse, Braque, Van Gogh, Gauguin, Monet, Manet, Picasso. His one single driving thought is to get those irreplaceable treasures away. He is a dedicated man, a man with lofty motives, serving a beast master, and himself part-beast.

He is a man doing the wrong thing—for the right reason.

His opposite number is a man of controlled brutishness, a Parisian railroadman named Labiche, who counts the cost of sabotage in human lives. X number of lives to stop this train, X number for that train. Only the most valuable trains—munitions, troops, etc.—are worth expending the lives of his fellow saboteurs. He rejects the plea of the drab little Frenchwoman (sensitively played by Suzanne Flon, who will be best remembered, perhaps, as Lautrec's mannequin love in Moulin Rouge) who has been Colonel Von Waldheim's assistant, to stop the Colonel from ferreting away with the golden heart of French culture. Paintings mean nothing to him; there's a war on; what has art to do with it? Not until Von Waldheim executes old Papa Boule, the engineer Labiche has assigned to the train, for trying to sabotage the locomotive pulling that fabulous cargo, does Labiche swear to stop the train. But still, the paintings mean nothing to him. Crated in their boxcars—7 Van Gogh, they are stenciled, or 4 Roualt, like herring, like machine parts, like piece goods—they are merely a symbol of frenzy to Labiche.

He will stop the train, he will defeat the Nazi, Von Waldheim. And therein lies the beautiful dichotomy of the story.

Because he is doing the right thing—for the wrong reason!

In essence, this 133-minute film is a titanic duel between the personalities of Von Waldheim: dedicated, brutal, ascetic, implacable yet sensitive, determined . . . and Labiche: physical, vengeful, cunning, artless yet graceful, equally determined. And while the paintings mean nothing to Labiche, they mean everything to Von Waldheim, they are his obsession.

In the final moments of the film, after a staggering loss of life over the inanimate cargo, when the battle has been won, Von Waldheim, even then, is able to tell Labiche that the paintings are his, will always be his, will always belong to him or a man like him, to men with the eyes to see beauty. He tells Labiche that he has won, but without even knowing why, or what he was doing, that the paintings mean as much to Labiche as a string of pearls to an ape.

And Labiche looks at the jumbled jackstraw tumble of French hostages Von Waldheim has had machine-gunned off the train, and kills the Nazi. The camera spastically intercuts between the jumbled crates of great paintings half-unloaded from the derailed train, and the dead Frenchmen. Cut and intercut, and only a dolt could fail to see the unspoken question: Were these paintings worth all these wasted lives?

It is a breathless visual posture of Frankenheimer as master of his craft, as symbolist, as preacher, as capturer of art for the masses, that does not demean the intellectual's praise. It sums up one of the basic questions of man in conflict with himself to preserve culture and civilization:

Is the life of a man greater or lesser than the art he produces in his most noble moments? Is it possible to equate the continued value of history and cultural heritage his finest work represents, weighed against common flesh, mortal clay? It is a question to which philosophers have only imperfect answers, and in restating the question in modern, cinematic, bold terms, Frankenheimer (and I would presume scenarists Franklin Coen and Frank Davis) has rendered a service. For more than entertainment has been provided, for those who would care to exercise their wit and intelligence.

Even serendipitously, this film provides marginal treasures, unexpected, and easy to love: a visual paean to the "high iron" of steam locomotion, a reverence for the filth and sweat and bravery of men who pushed the steam horses; a sensation of grandeur the diesel engineers of today cannot possibly feel about their semisilent zip-machines. It is a final hurrah voiced in closeups of sooty engines, long shots down on marshaling yards, pans and zooms to and away from specific bits of iron that speak of the majesty of the whistle-screeching, thunder-making days of railroading, now almost entirely passed into history.

And more: England's incomparable Paul Scofield as the many-faceted Nazi Colonel, rendering a portrayal of complexity and even—impossibly—compassion, with a minimum of arm-waving, with a reserve of style that bespeaks great talent. His every moment on the screen is a gesture of possession; he strides across this film as palpably impressive as the train itself, and in time, the train dwindles in import, and the man trying to rule it becomes the central figure of the drama, despite the plotting of script which offers us Burt Lancaster as Labiche. Correction. It offers us

Burt Lancaster as Captain Marvel.

When I was a child, and read the Capt. Marvel comics, I never really thought any harm would come to that great red cheese. He could always pull off something, after all, he was superhuman, wasn't he? My feeling was paralleled with Lancaster as I watched this film. He can act, certainly, but on what level above that of swashbuckling, I cannot conceive. The usual Lancasterite mannerisms—the clenched teeth, the balled fist swung across the body, the spread-legged stance and the furiously shaken arm, the tossed curls, all so damnably typical and cliche, so useless and needless here, in a setting of purest gold—the same mannerisms of Elmer Gantry, once again, for the millionth time restated.

The intrusive personality of Lancaster the acrobat, doing his special parlor tricks down ladders, over garden walls, superbly muscled and annoying as hell when they tell us over and over, "I'm not really Labiche, I'm Lancaster."

It is to Frankenheimer's credit that he has been able to direct around this more-than-minuscule handicap. His direction (blessedly done in black and white, precisely what the production demanded) is massive, great blocks of shadow and light, a study in chiaroscuro; dark, jagged, dense, swung with great authority, like the railroad crane needed to lift the wrecked locomotive off the tracks. Purposely ponderous at times, quicksilver here and gone at other times. He has filmed it with what might be termed "affectionate realism," a sense of proportion and piety that transcends mere naturalism, that lingers on the proper things for the proper amount of time.

Scofield, Jeanne Moreau, the Falstaffian Michel Simon as Papa Boule, Wolfgang Preiss adding another memorable characterization to his already-illustrious career with his portrayal of the Nazi railroad specialist Major Herren, muffin-shaped Albert Remy as the fellow-saboteur of Labiche, striking to the heart of the film's meaning with his gentle, skillful rendering of a simple peasant patriot . . . all of them lend tone and dignity and artistry to a film of notable proportions.

The Train is a success. It succeeds not only on its own terms, but on the greater, more stringent, terms of strictest art criticism. It is a film of purity, it is even a loftier breed of "entertainment," and it deserves all the praise and attention we can give it.

Simply, it is a film not to be missed.

It is the whale, and not the flea.

Cinema / July–August 1965