Customer Reviews

The Train (Widescreen)

5 star:		(34)
4 star:		(8)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

Is a work of art worth a human life?
We are near the end of World War II. It's August 2, 1944, the "1511th day of German occupation" of Paris. German Colonel von Waldheim (Paul Scofield) enters a dark museum and turns a spotlight on a painting. He stares at it with the eyes of a lover beholding his best beloved. He turns another spotlight on another painting. The Hun is humanized, and we sympathize with his quiet passion.
It comes as a bit of a shock when he announces that he is taking the paintings, hundreds of Miros and Picassos and Matisses and others, with him when the Germans evacuate Paris. A resistance group, led by railroad worker Paul Labiche (Burt Lancaster), is enlisted to stop them. Labiche initially refuses. It's one thing to blow up a train, dangerous enough - it's another to stop a train without damaging what's inside it. National heritage or not, men will die. There are more important targets than a train filled with art. Things change, though, and eventually Labiche and the remnants of his resistance group find themselves trying the impossible.
I've always been a little leery of Burt Lancaster. Maybe I was traumatized by viewing THE RAINMAKER or ELMER GANTRY at a young and impressionable age. He sometimes seems all horse teeth and braying charm and dis-tinct e-nunc-ee-a-shun. Not so here. In THE TRAIN he's restrained and natural and completely convincing. Scofield is equally strong as his brutal nemesis.
Sometimes the extras on a dvd aren't worth the bother, but I loved the director's commentary by the late John Frankenheimer. It was like taking a course in the art of film making.
Frankenheimer tells us he was trying to give the movie a realistic feel, which I understood before listening to the commentary track but didn't really understand how he went about it. One trick he used was to open the f-stop on the camera and keep everything in focus, something that would have been impossible if THE TRAIN wasn't shot in black and white. Everything is kept in focus and he keeps the background action busy and interesting.
Frankenheimer is an unabashed fan of Burt Lancaster, with whom he made five movies. Not only does Lancaster do all his own stunts in this one, including a dangerous backwards fall off of a moving train, he even fills in as a stunt double for another actor. The original stuntman made a fall off a roof look like an "olympic jump," and 'realism' was the keyword in this one. Lancaster did take a nice tumble off the tiles, but you've got to wonder about the wisdom of it all. Lancaster was injured during the filming of THE TRAIN; on his first day off in weeks he played a round of golf and twisted his knee when he stepped into a hole. His right knee swelled up 'like a basketball.' Frankenheimer shot Labiche in the leg halfway through the movie to explain the limp.
The only phony movie aspect to this movie is the dubbed voices of some of the French actors. You can't hide dubbing very well, and Frankenheimer doesn't have much to say about it. I wouldn't knock a star or even a half-star off because of it. This is a tremendously entertaining film.

This is a bona fide classic! One of the most influential action movies ever. Watch it and you'll see the elments that were later used in action films like Die Hard, etc.

Although it is a little bit overlooked today, it remains a one [heck] of a ride! Lancaster plays a french railroad employee who works for the resistence. He and his group of three men must do anything to stop a train loaded with art treasures (Picassos, Matisses, Renoirs, Monets - no less) which is heading to Germany, according to the plans of a german Colonel who happens to love art. Stopping a train is easy - as they all discover. The problem is the art treasures who cannot be simply blown up (and that is a problem the allied planes do no know of).

So, it is up to a small group of men to keep the train out of both nazis and allies power - a difficult task in the last days of WW2.

The story meets many exciting complications and climaxes but the real catch is the strong performances from the two leads (Burt Lancaster and Paul Scofield) who fight each other in a battle of wills we'll rarely see again. Their antagonistic missions are the key element in a film full of great moments.

The black and white cinematography by Jean Tournier is great and the DVD do it justice. Keep in mind that this is a film by John Frankenheimmer - the great director who brought us movies like "The Manchurian Candidate", "Birdman of Alcatraz", and "The French Connection".

The DVD also has a great commentary by the director himself and an alternate "music-only" audio track for the Maurice Jarre's music soundtrack. This is a true great film. The only minus is the lack of a new dolby 5.1 sound mix - in a film like this, it would sure be a great thing! Anyway, the Dolby original Mono is solid enough.

There are an amazing amount of action films these days. Each one of them attempts to beat the last one's visual effects. And in this competition, hollywood has lost track of what makes a truly great action film... Skill. Most of the action films these days are entirely uncreative, and many of them are very, very boring. Who really want's to see a dozen tiles fall to the ground and break in slow motion, as films such as "the Matrix" use this technique constantly. But this film is different. It carries raw emotional power, and it's star, at age 50, did all of his own stunts, and even drove the locamotives that his character drives. This movie is awesome, and I highly recommend you buy this DvD. And by the way, this music track is a lot of fun to listen to when you're sick.

I really loved this DVD. I watched it several times and is one of the best I have seen.

When Burt Lancaster called on director John Frankeheimer yet again to rescue another picture from another director who had left the project, the call took Frankenheimer to Paris to bring his brilliant black and white extreme depth of focus shots to bear on thought provoking subject matter.

La Bisch, the unwilling resistance man late in WWII (Lancaster) is pitted despite his objections against a cultured German general who is attempting to take every painted masterpiece out of Paris that can be found.

Knowing that delays to shipment in the face of the german retreat and allied advance, La Bisch uses both ingenuity and enormous physical effort to attempt to block the movement of a train laden with stolen art, eastbound from Paris.

The plot twists are the stuff of legend, and each twist provokes controversial positions regarding the importance of art and the brevity of human life.

The long shot action scenes in this film are brilliant, and Lancaster, who was injured during filming, performs much of the extraordinary scenes in the movie with a real (not feigned) limp.

Fine ensemble cast, including many of the best French character actors of the time, a serious script saved by brevity from the melodramatic and arguably the best camerawork and editing of any action film in history (you read right) make this film superior to Frankenheimer's other B&W films from the period (e.g., The Manchurian Candidate and even The Birdman of Alcatraz).

The Train belongs in any serious English language cine collection. This is one of the top 100 films of all time.

C'est un classique du cinéma avec Burt Lancaster jouant le rôle d'un directeur de l'acheminement des trains qui doit prendre les moyens nécessaires pour empêcher un train rempli d'oeuvres d'art provenant de musées français de se rendre en Allemagne. C'est un film en noir et blanc et il aurait été intéressant qu'il contienne également la version française car il a été tourné en France avec plusieurs comédiens français connus comme Michel Simon et Jeanne Moreau.

The audio on the MGM DVD was lacking the full spectrum of audio, in my opinion. If you don't care so much about audio, it would be a 5 star DVD, but for those feeling that audio is an important factor, a star must be deducted. Bass and treble just weren't tweaked in DVD production which made the audio seem really flat, and I know that MGM could have produced a better job. It seems that a good number of the MGM DVDs lack the care and attention of producing consistently superior products.

The DVD gives the viewer options to listen to music only and has an option for director's comments during the film. I was at first dismayed because at the beginning of the movie, director John Frankenheimer just wouldn't open up. But he started sharing some interesting things as the movie progressed. There is also an 8- page booklet that gives some interesting production notes and history.

The video quality from, I think, an original film print is pristine. Frankenheimer's locations and times of filming were very effective in evoking a very dismal feeling as the European conflict was drawing to a conclusion. I love Frankenheimer's use of deep focus -- which is using wide angle lenses to have both near and far- away characters and scenes in focus -- to give a vision that many other filmmakers fail to incorporate effectively.

I'm glad that there was explanation in the film about why people were more concerned with paintings than people in a story that was loosely based on an actual event. Many westerners like Paul Labiche (Burt Lancaster) would not care about the value of crates of artwork in a time of war, but schooling by caretaker Miss Villard (Suzanne Flon) expressed the passion and pride that the French feel for such paintings. This helped explain why some would scarifice their lives to save the crates. (Ms. Flon, born in 1918 is apparently still alive and acting, too.)

It's quite a story of saving "priceless" paintings at the expense of one's life. It seems like a WWII action film (which has its share of blowing stuff up), but its story actually weighs the value of art against the value of life. Labiche from the very beginning of his introduction battles Col. von Waldheim (Paul Scolfield), who wants him to deliver the art to Germany AND The Resistance, who want the art protected from the Nazis. Labiche is actually alone in his own beliefs as an American, being tugged by both sides while ultimately struggling with making sense of the conflict over the art.

The movie is well- developed from Lancaster asking Frankenheimer to direct "The Train" after original director Arthur Penn abandoned the project a week after production. I only say that because everything that was directed by Frankenheimer was terrific. The choice of the players, scenery, editing, camera placement and post production yielded a perfect war film that wasn't simply about war. It was about the value of life and what people value in their lives.

Watch for the one scene of a runaway train's derailment -- one of a dozen cameras mounted to film the scene -- came within inches of being wiped out by the locomotive's wheels and the scene has become a classic in filmmaking history.

Bookend this film alongside THE MANCHURIAN CANDIDATE and SEVEN DAYS IN MAY and one comes to the easy realization that Director John Frankenheimer has captured three of the most riveting, enthrallings, and incredible explorations of human conflict on black-and-white celluloid.

I won't trouble you with the typical rehash of the plot here except to add that the screenplay is based on factual events. That isn't to say that Frankenheimer delivers a documentary; instead, he takes a relatively documentary-style approach, throwing in several fictional embellishments as plot intricacies, and he delivers an exuberant twist on a wartime "race against the clock" with only a handful of curious slow moments.

THE TRAIN starts slow, much like the vehicle itself, but it reaches full steam quickly and comes to an equally brilliant and disturbing crash-filled climax (in more ways than one) with a statement about the ugliness of human conflict.

Director John Frankenheimer's THE TRAIN was released in 1965. Set in the final days of Nazi occupied Paris during the WWII it tells a tale of how the French Resistance attempted to stop a train carrying a cargo of paintings from entering into Germany. The paintings had been held in a museum in Paris throughout the German occupation. These were not works by the old masters but instead were works painted by the impressionist and post impressionist artists whose paintings had been labeled degenerate by Nazi Germany. Though labeled degenerate or depraved by the Nazis these paintings had not been destroyed. At the beginning of the film we are introduced to German Colonel von Waldheim played by Paul Scofield. At first he appears to be a sympathetic character who allowed the museum curator Miss Villard to remain in charge of these paintings. She thanks him for not removing her and expresses that she detects his appreciation for the paintings after he admits to her that as a German officer he should not have been moved by degenerate art. When German soldiers come into the museum and crate all the paintings for railway shipment to Germany it is evident that the paintings have a monetary value to the Nazis if not an aesthetic one. Colonel von Waldheim uses this point to procure a military train. Miss Villard seeks out the help of the French Resistance namely Labiche, a railway yardmaster, played by Burt Lancaster to stop the train. Labiche is at first disinterested because the efforts of the Resistance should be aimed at military targets. However, Villard pleads that the paintings are part of the French culture and part of France itself and should never leave the country. Labiche gives in and the story focuses on the determination of Labiche and German Colonel von Waldheim to thwart each other's attempts from accomplishing their tasks. This is one of Burt Lancaster's greatest performances demonstrating his athletic abilities and his intuitive sense of histrionics to create a visual screen presence of pure determination to stop an equally determined foe who represents a [badness] gone beyond the limits of an already [horrible] Nazi regime. Paul Scofield's performance is the complete opposite but equally determined played with a strange and enigmatic detachment. As the movie progresses we see that von Waldheim's [character] degenerates even though he remains oblivious to his own shortcomings as a human being. The more obstacles that Labiche puts in the way of the train we see von Waldheim respond with firing squads for all those that assist Labiche. Colonel von Waldheim has stolen and transports the paintings under the pretense that they a resource to the Reich. In fact von Waldheim has convinced himself that he alone or only a man like him is capable of appreciating such paintings. Air raids, derailments, staged locomotive crashes, diversions, detours and so on hamper the train ever mile on its way to Germany. Near the end of the movie von Waldheim puts French hostages along the walkways of the locomotive to stop Labiche from blowing up the tracks and engine. ... Composer Maurice Jarre's score ends the film on a melancholy note of reflection using the dynamic melody he created for the French Resistance now played on a muted harmonica in a bittersweet comment on the futility of war. ... Director John Frankenheimer created this epic with such precision that you just can not appreciate the labors of all the technicians and actors went into making this film. John Frankenheimer is one of my favorite directors. He's way up there on the list. This film is a cinematic achievement of storytelling, action and great ... soul searching.

It's a great film, but never mind the plot.

The cinematography is fantastic!

Every shot is a winner - if your into photography check this film.