John Frankheimer’s The Train is loosely based on events related in Le front de l’art by Rose Valland. Burt Lancaster (From Here to Eternity, Run Silent, Run Deep) plays Paul Labiche, who is in charge of the railway station where a train full of priceless French paintings will start out of the soon-to-be liberated Paris towards Germany.
Labiche is also in an ever-dwindling resistance cell and is asked by museum curator Mademoiselle Villard (Suzanne Flon, playing a fictionalized Valland) to delay or stop the train. Labiche answers, “I won’t waste lives on paintings.” But lives are lost, and he risks his own, always suspecting they have been wasted. The question of the value of culture, art and human life is interwoven in an exciting movie with great cinematography and practical effects.
I really like and admire The Train; it is well conceived and executed as well as entertaining and satisfying. Some might find it slow, but I’m saying that in order to say something negative. This movie isn’t transcendentally great—it isn’t a breakthrough in cinema–but it’s great.
Someone could and probably does teach how to compose shots with this movie. There are complex yet seemingly everyday tracking shots of people working and moving through offices. The second time we see Labiche, he walks across the railway yard in an extended tracking shot that shows the loosely organized chaos of any wartime endeavor–there is much to see in the shot, and it also contains an M3 Sighting.
A whole lot of tire and a little bit of Lancaster and an M3
It is a very handsome movie. It’s in black and white and uses deep focus to great effect. Here are some videos about depth of field, and other focal tricks. They’re a little long; the short version is deep focus is where most things in the frame are in focus; shallow focus has far fewer things in focus in the frame, while other things are out of focus–this helps viewers know where to look, but also kind of forces them to look in specific places.
Deep focus doesn’t force you to look at one spot. In the movie’s first shot, there are guards in the foreground as a staff car appears in the background and drives up to a building; a German officer gets out and goes in. You follow the car when it first appears because it’s the thing moving, but if you want, you can look at some bored guards in the foreground.
When the action is in the foreground, there is often still something going on in the background–people working or loitering–living their lives. This enhances the realism because we don’t just see actors doing scenes. Sometimes there is activity outside the window while characters inside are delivering dialogue. Sometimes the important action is outside the window while we are inside. We watch Labiche leave a hotel, run through a backyard and scale a fence and later return via the same route, while we wait in the hotel.
Lancaster was an acrobat early in life; his abilities mesh perfectly with the movie’s style. In this scene, he swiftly descends a ladder and hops on to a moving train. There’s no need to cut away or use any tricks because Lancaster just does it.
Not using tricks is Frankenheimer’s trick. The way he films trains crashing into each other is by having actual trains actually crash into each other. And they don’t then burst into flames because things don’t generally burst into flames just because they happen to run into each other. Everything is practically done, but more precisely everything that isn’t gunfire or bombs is actually done.
As you can see in the previous clip, he also depicts a railroad station blowing up by blowing up a railroad station. At another point Lancaster forges a replacement part for a damaged train–he actually pours hot iron into a mold and everything. We watch him build the part and put it on the train.
This nearly obsessive realism makes us believe the elaborate ruses that the French employ to keep the train from reaching Germany. We see the inter workings of the trains and the stations down to very small details. Workmen pull switches, and we see the tracks switch; they uncoupled cars or sabotage engines with coins, and we are shown every step. Like a magician sharing his tricks after we’ve been fooled, Frankenheimer shows you everything and how the Germans are tricked, and time and again you think this won’t work, and it does—and you believe it could have.
But then he also shows what the cost is. A number of people are summarily executed after successfully tricking the Germans. In one scene, Labiche pleads for the life of an engineer in the foreground while the background action shows the engineer being put against a wall and shot.
The film has a real sense of tension; there are a bunch of close calls, and he is about to be caught–the Germans are coming! Of course you shouldn’t feel this way; it’s Burt Lancaster—he can’t die in this movie, but so many do, and it’s so dangerous; it’s all plausible.
Even though this is absolutely an action movie, there are interesting characters as well. Paul Scofield plays a German colonel who is obsessed with the paintings–maybe because he loves them, maybe because of their cash value.
Labiche also becomes obsessed with his mission, and even he doesn’t know why. At one point another character tells him, “you get caught up in something, you can’t leave it alone.” That is as close as we get to understanding Labiche’s motivation.
If Labiche can’t tell you why he’s risking his life, can anyone? Are these cultural artifacts more important than human lives? Is anything? In this scene with the innkeeper Christine, played by Jeanne Moreau, he reveals as much about himself as he does at any point. Note the deep focus here allows us to look at Lanacaster’s reactions while Moreau is speaking in the foreground. If you want to be catty, you could also note that Moreau has her back to the camera for much of Lancaster’s dialogue, ensuring that we look at him.
But this movie isn’t about why; it’s about how. Seeing these complex ruses unfold is both interesting and entertaining.
The ending is probably overstated, trying to enforce meaning and a sort of closure on something that may be too complex for simple closure and making the antagonist less complex. The final images, after all the shooting, including boxes of paintings strewn like bodies, say more than who shoots who at the end—and of course they are beautifully composed and clear.
Recommendation
The Train is exciting and watchable and re-watchable and has some extras on the Blu-Ray, so it’s on my to buy list, but there’s also a copy at my local library, so you may get a chance to watch it for free–When you get a chance to watch it, take it.
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.”