From the Rental Vault: The Train

Although he was certainly one of the biggest box-office draws of his era, Burt Lancaster had an affinity for some melancholy spins on his action, war or Western crowd-pleasers. Working with John Frankenheimer, director of The Manchurian Candidate, he helped create one such movie in the 1964 black-and-white war picture The Train.

Near the end of Germany's occupation of Paris, German Colonel Franz von Waldheim (Paul Scofield) has hundreds of priceless works of art crated up to be taken to Germany. The musuem curator contacts the French resistance to see if he can be stopped. The cell, led by Paul Labiche (Lancaster), decides not to try to save the train, saying it will be too great a risk for their diminished numbers. Labiche is the switching director of a Paris trainyard, and has created a plan to stall a German artillery train so it can be bombed by the Allies. Other cell members and some engineers have decided they will try to stall von Waldheim's train long enough for the Allies to retake Paris and save the art. Against his will and better judgment, Labiche joins their efforts, which are equal part sabotage, Mission-Impossible-style caper and straight-up espionage. As the human cost of stalling the train mounts, Labiche must decide if the price is worth it, while von Waldheim comes closer and closer to completely losing it in his desire to get the train into Germany.

Frankenheimer's direction elevates the trains themselves to star status in the movie -- their ponderous weight and immense strength at the mercy of the minimal contact between wheel and rail parallels how the movie's two antagonists barely manage to contain the energy behind their efforts. He includes a number of deep-focus, long tracking shots that add layers of realism to the action. Things are never still; a railyard is full of workers and soldiers moving about their business behind the leads as they talk, offices scurry with activity as German soldiers burn documents they can't transport or leave behind.

Lancaster is, as usual, a massive presence in almost every scene where he plays against other actors because of his stature. Only when he's alone and outdoors does he seem normal-sized or at all vulnerable to injury. Scofield's intensity starts out icy as he finesses his way past a general's appropriation of all trains for military purposes, then begins to burn with mania as his plans keep being thwarted. Both men seem as unable to change their course as a train is to leave its tracks, even though the human beings have a free will the machines do not.

The black-and-white photography -- The Train may have been the last major action picture not filmed in color -- adds to the bleakness of the story and the setting. There are plenty of taut action sequences among the brilliant performances, but The Train isn't what modern audiences would call a thriller -- it shows victories as well as defeats have costs. It's still well worth its two-hours-plus running time and the thinking it might bring about.