The Battle of the Rails (La Bataille du rail) is a 1946 film, directed by René Clément (Is Paris Burning?), depicting French railway workers resisting German occupation. It is interesting and at some points excellent, but it is often not engaging. Its documentary style makes it far too much like a reasonably informative piece of propaganda and not enough like a moving or exciting motion picture.
To be fair, it was released the year after the war ended and appears to be trying to be a reasonably informative piece of propaganda, but the moments that are more than that leave me yearning for the whole film to be more than that.
It begins in a documentary style with a voiceover that explains the ways the plucky French railway workers stymied the all too easily stymied Germans. It does explain some tactics that I’m sure were used ( I guess; this is not a history site). Less than halfway through, the voiceover ends, and it is more like a movie than a documentary, but one without a protagonist—–instead we see a series of plucky Frenchmen stymie the Germans without a voiceover. The second part has some stronger scenes but no narrative momentum.
Despite its lack of cohesiveness, some parts are brilliant. At one point a man is put up against a wall to be shot and is on the far end of the line and must listen to his comrades being shot one by one. Knowing the end of his life is coming, he looks at the sky and at a spider—beautiful, ugly, mundane things he will never see again. We see the others fall, and his reactions are heartbreaking.
This one scene is great and has a depth and humanity the rest of the film lacks. This is a little unkind because this one scene is truly outstanding, so expecting any film to hit that kind of height throughout is unfair. But during the bulk of the film, we see men risking their lives, and we are not invested in them; we don’t know them, and often their actions don’t seem that dangerous, in part because the Germans are often too easily duped, and every Frenchman can be trusted because Clement would seemingly have you believe all Frenchmen resisted.
John Frankenheimer’s1964 film, The Train similarly makes it seem every Frenchman is in on it—all that is required is to dupe the often easily duped Germans. But The Train makes it seem more intrinsically difficult and dangerous and some Frenchmen are at least reluctant—the stakes seem higher though they are of course exactly the same.
This shot is pretty cool.
It also may well be a remarkable technical achievement for 1946.There’s a shot from the underneath a train that is very well done—there’s a lot of stuff that’s really well done. These flashes of brilliance leave me wanting more instead of being satisfied with them.
Part of the very strong train attack towards the end of the film.
There’s a truly impressive train wreck that was done by actually derailing a train, and towards the end partisans attack an armored train, and this attack is certainly well done for 1946, though its sometimes blurry, and many partisan lose their lives against the heavily armed Germans. These are good battle sequences that seem authentic
Finally, The Battle of the Rails is a postwar propaganda film that glorifies the French resistance. Although some few moments are great, the film lacks a cohesive whole. I’m left wanting much more from this film than it delivers.
,Recommendation
The Battle of the Rails in fine, go ahead and watch it, but The Train is excellent–watch it more than once
If you want some music about trains, Billy Bragg and Joe Henry did a whole album. Or buy Bragg’s great album Talking with the Taxman About Poetry, which includes the song “Train Train.”