John Frankenheimer’s The Train opens in a darkened Parisian museum, a lone art enthusiast standing in hushed silence before a rich banquet of famous French masterpieces. That this man is not some ordinary museumgoer but Franz von Waldheim (Paul Scofield), a Wehrmacht colonel, completes the effect of the image, swathed in shadows punctuated by small bursts of light, balanced between menace and allure. The meditative Nazi is at this point on his way out, the general retreat in motion as Allied troops advance, and seems to be stealing one last glance at what he refers to as degenerate art, a guilty pleasure for a committed fascist functionary. Instead, the scene climaxes with the revelation that all the paintings will be seized and packed off back to the fatherland, von Waldheim’s melancholy less an instance of genuine poignancy than a sentimental concession to the cash-strapped imperatives undergirding his fast-collapsing ideology. The war effort needs money, labor and blood to keep running, and it will consume these things for as long as it continues, irrespective of the human value they represent.
To compare the penny pinching of Nazi goons to the financial single-mindedness of studio brass would be crass, but the implicit suggestion is there, and a good part of the impact of The Train comes from this kind of metatextual shadings. The idea of choosing to steal something you have publicly deemed worthless, indicating an understanding of its monetary potential while disregarding the value others might find in it, points to the exact hollowness that has defined the economic status quo of Hollywood, both in 1964 and today. Trapped somewhere between Manny Farber’s opposing poles of “white elephant” and “termite” art, the movie represents an often-jagged fusion of puffed-up prestige picture and stripped-down thriller. This is not a work that is immediately apparent as either high culture or low, a weird piece of pop cinema product that didn’t make a huge splash upon release. Yet its technical construction is immaculate, and its cumulative effect is as rich and interesting as any tightly focused character study, a fascinating relic of the centuries-long battle of art versus craft.
The straightforward plot concerns the efforts by French rail workers, functioning as a silent arm of the Resistance, to stop the shipment from disappearing into the maw of the dying Reich, where its contents will most likely be lost forever. Allied forces are just outside the city, but as initial attempts at a slowdown fail, they have to step up their efforts toward a desperate ruse, creating an alternative reality incorporating the switching out of station signs and more overt acts of track sabotage, in which the train is circuitously rerouted back into France, rather than continuing across the border to Germany. At the center is Burt Lancaster as Paul Labiche, a burnt-out engineer whose naked distaste for his current task ‒ imperiling his men to save several inanimate crates of artwork ‒ is eventually secondary to his commitment to his job, as well as his greater disgust for the Nazis he’s opposing.
The film’s straightforward, somewhat clunky message about the importance of human life over art is ultimately subsumed within a more effective statement, where the primacy granted to technique counterbalances the excesses of an overheated script. Production was originally initiated by Arthur Penn, who Lancaster had fired a few days into shooting, scrapping the footage and bringing in trusted collaborator Frankenheimer to rewrite the entire script. It seems likely that the director, exhausted from several successive projects and forced to halt development on eventual masterpiece Seconds, saw something of himself in Labiche. That this connection is underplayed, serving merely as a grace note to a procession of inventively conceived, expertly dispensed set pieces, is key to the film’s success.
Another key bit of subtext is that while beauty is in the eye of the beholder, aesthetic refinement itself does not have some transformative effect upon a person. In a concept that would be further tweaked by Tarantino’s Colonel Hans Landa, manifested in all his unctuous glory by Christoph Waltz, the fine taste of a connoisseur points to a surprising blackness of spirit, indicating an inherent denial of humanity, rather than an expression of it. In this case, the film’s heroes share a proudly ignorant defiance of art’s import or power, and there’s thankfully no schlocky scenes of its essential beauty speaking to their souls. Their motivation resides in either a stubborn Gallic commitment to a whiff of French cultural pride they have no actual engagement with (typified by Michel Simon’s tragic, bibulous Papa Boule) or a beaten-down disinterest in anything outside the realm of immediate survival (Jeanne Moreau’s Christine). The movie’s core is represented by Labiche, a character who in no way comes off as French, cast as some kind of universal (but still distinctly American) icon of resistance, resembling a brawny Soviet symbol, sheened with sweat and grease. As is so often the case, Lancaster’s stolidity is encased around a taut central spindle, his tensile energy thrumming like drawn cable, always retaining the capacity for a sudden snap.
This performance foregrounds the entire film, serving as the axle for the onrushing progress of his mutually destructive conflict with the dispassionate, coolly monstrous von Waldheim. The flow of history is often shown as an intractable process, particularly in movies about trains, whose rigid motion provides few avenues for modification or escape. Here, that idea is subverted. The tracks are immovable, but change is always possible, albeit through massive, concentrated conflict, defined by spraying sparks and grinding steel. The Nazis may possess control of the entire landscape, but claimed territory is still subject to the will of its people, a condition which in this case is activated to magnificent overall effect.
This effect is that of shackles being loosed, but the pain and struggle of their removal is deeply felt, and masterfully conveyed, expressed in a series of vivid lines slashed across the landscape, geometric planes freighted with sacrificial intensity. Shot almost entirely in actual outdoor settings, The Train cements itself as one of the first truly modern blockbusters, with a coldly mathematical construction humanized by the fact that each death counts, the faces of the fallen accorded prime position. In the end, it all boils down to the actions of two representative figures, one of resistance, the other of stasis. Just as a pile of paintings means more than the cumulative weight of the cargo, the endeavor of a people to throw off their oppressor stands as distillation of something beyond simple description, centuries of heritage and feeling amalgamated into a movement encompassing a wide variety of beliefs and attitudes.
The closest modern analogue to this effect is found in the recent Shin Godzilla, a genre exercise that delivers the necessary thrills while assembling a painstaking mosaic of collective effort that operates in tandem with its technical proficiency. As a piece of mass-market fare, the movie offers a development of Lancaster’s persona in Birdman of Alcatraz and Seven Days in May, and also a predecessor to De Niro’s successor character in Ronin, who occupies a post-factional world where no one believes in anything. Frankenheimer’s films prioritize the psychic torture of the individualist enmeshed in a fracturing world of competing interests and alliances, but The Train accomplishes something different, its formal and narrative depiction of coordinated labor ultimately more enduring than its anti-authoritarian attempt at individualist mythmaking.
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