John Frankenheimer (1964)

This account of how French modern art masterpieces were saved from depredation by the Nazis was made fifty years before The Monuments Men.  The Train is itself an action thriller rather than a work of art but, in the hands of John Frankenheimer, the storytelling is good and the action sequences are impressively staged (and well edited by David Bretherton).  In August 1944, with the liberation of Paris imminent, the title vehicle – including three carriages full of paintings seized from the Jeu de Paume museum – needs, from the Germans’ point of view, to leave the French capital as soon as possible.  The museum curator appeals to the French Resistance to delay the train’s departure – without, of course, damaging its priceless cargo.

The interrupted journey is bookended by effective opening and closing scenes.  The Train begins in the Jeu de Paume, where a dialogue between the curator (Suzanne Flon) and the German officer Colonel von Waldheim (Paul Scofield) is seminal in establishing the latter’s keen aesthetic awareness.  In contrast, Paul Labiche (Burt Lancaster), the leader of the Resistance group charged with sabotaging the progress of the train, is insensitive to the importance of Renoir, Picasso et al and repeatedly angered by the primacy in his assignment of France’s ‘national heritage’.  Frankenheimer dramatises the central moral dilemma – the worth of art versus the worth of human life – obviously but efficiently.  Labiche’s colleagues are killed, one after another, in their resourceful attempts to thwart the Germans.  In a final confrontation between them, von Waldheim derides Labiche:

‘A painting means as much to you as a string of pearls to an ape. … You stopped me without knowing what you were doing or why…’

In response, Labiche looks at the bodies beside the railway track – the corpses of  civilian hostages, whom von Waldheim ordered to be put on the train to prevent its being blown up, and whom the Germans have killed.  Labiche shoots von Waldheim dead, without quite silencing the force of his words.  A well-judged, diminuendo last shot shows Labiche limping away from the human carnage and the juxtaposed crates of art works, into the empty countryside.

As usual with Burt Lancaster, actions speak louder – more eloquently, at any rate – than words.  He’s exceptionally right here when he’s doing things – not just in his athletic ability to shin up and down a ladder or fall from a moving train but also in his convincing concentration on small but crucial pieces of Labiche’s manual labour – like tightening or loosening a screw.  Lancaster can also be expressive when he has a line of four or five words but it’s not the same when he declaims at greater length.  And because he’s the only member of the cast (Paul Scofield included), who isn’t speaking English in a continental European accent, Lancaster is too salient as a man – an indestructible Hollywood hero – apart.  There are good scenes, however, between him and Jeanne Moreau, as a widow who runs a small hotel that becomes a key location.  Their differing temperaments and acting tempo are strongly complementary.  (Moreau registers mood changes so quickly and obliquely:  she does some fine emotional business with a corkscrew, repeatedly trying and failing to open a bottle of wine.)

Paul Scofield gives von Waldheim a persuasive blend of monomaniac determination and bitter apprehension of defeat.  Much of the dialogue sounds post-recorded and takes some getting used to, especially from the less familiar voices, but there are good supporting performances from Michel Simon, as an elderly, past-caring train driver, and Wolfgang Preiss, as Scofield’s number two.  Maurice Jarre wrote the score.  The screenplay, by Franklin Coen and Frank Davis, was inspired by a non-fiction book, Le front de l’art, by Rose Valland, an art historian and French Resistance member.

28 April 2017