THE TRAIN (1964)

Near the end of John Frankenheimer’s The Train, a group of French civilian hostages are machine-gunned by their Nazi captors. This mass murder is completely pointless—Germany is already on the retreat from France, and the specific threat the hostages were being held to protect against is no longer an issue—and is filmed almost casually by Frankenheimer, as an incidental detail. As with the portrayal of other killings in the film, though, this offhandedness makes it all the more shocking, and is undoubtedly intentional: by seemingly inviting us to shrug off the atrocity and move on to something more important, rather than forcing us to regard it as central, Frankenheimer puts us in much the same position as his protagonist Labiche (Burt Lancaster).

Labiche himself has, directly or indirectly, over the course of The Train ended many lives, both German and French, in an effort to prevent the Nazis removing a huge collection of famous artworks from France to Germany. Did saving the paintings—which were not even going to be destroyed—really justify this cost? A montage of corpses and boxes stencilled with names like Renoir, Matisse, Degas, Cezanne makes the question explicit in this final scene, but it’s one that runs through The Train from the very beginning and is characteristic of a film which is both a war action thriller par excellence and a surprisingly uncomfortable rumination on the potential self-destructiveness of patriotism and the way we can value symbols over people.

Set in August 1944, the film starts—after an establishing shot—in the Jeu de Paume museum in Paris. A German officer, Colonel von Waldheim (Paul Scofield) arrives to inspect a room of paintings (including 64 Picassos, we’re later informed). He is joined by a Frenchwoman, Mademoiselle Villard (Suzanne Flon), and tells her that with the liberation of Paris by the Allies so close, the collection will be moved to a “safe place”, meaning Germany. He professes not to value the art for itself, calling it “degenerate” and claiming to be interested only in its value (“money is a weapon”), but we may well sense that his connection to it runs deeper.

The foundation of the plot is here in this very first exchange, and so is its basis in history. Villard is a thinly-disguised version of the French art expert Rose Valland, whose writing is acknowledged as a source for the film. Waldheim is based on General Heinrich von Behr, who did indeed plan to ship a vast assembly of artworks from France to Germany, and the Jeu de Paume museum was indeed used by the Nazis as a storage facility for art they were stealing— this isn’t quite clear in the film, where it might seem that all the paintings are the museum’s own collection, although it’s an unimportant point. (Another character based on Valland was played by Cate Blanchett in 2014’s The Monuments Men, although that film’s focus is mostly elsewhere, and the art treasures stored in the Jeu de Paume are also featured in 1967’s The Night of the Generals.)

From here on, however, The Train progressively departs further and further from the historical reality. The French Resistance was indeed able to prevent the train carrying the artworks from making it to Germany, but their operation was less dramatic and elaborate than the one masterminded in the film by Lancaster’s Labiche, a railway manager and leader of a Resistance cell, after Villard asks his group for help. In a neat variation on the usual requirements of saboteur films, she wants the train stopped just long enough for the Allies to reach Paris—but of course not destroyed.

It will be dangerous, and one of the difficult-to-answer questions at the heart of the movie emerges here. Villard argues that “those paintings are part of France”, implying that taking them to Germany would be another kind of enemy occupation. But Labiche has already seen most of the members of his Resistance group killed, and is initially reluctant to “waste lives on paintings” (unlike Waldheim, who will later say the train is “more valuable” than men); he wants to target an armaments train, more immediately relevant to defeating the Germans, instead. When, inevitably, he does agree to Villard’s proposal, he’s angry at a pair of other men who try to join in, and tries to dissuade them. The war is nearly over (at least in this part of France), he feels their self-sacrifice at this stage would be idiotic, and in insisting that he’d rather do it alone, he comes across as matter-of-fact and realistic rather than selflessly heroic—The Train does not big up even its main star.

The remainder of the film follows the Resistance effort to prevent the train from leaving France, much of which involves ingenious, well-explained deceptions (even if it’s a little far-fetched that they could be organised quite so quickly). The narrative emphasis is almost continuously on Labiche, although the contributions of others are not ignored, and the battle of wits between him and Waldheim becomes increasingly personal. Eventually, another Nazi will ask Waldheim “Labiche or the train… which do you want?” and by the end, it’s clear that the colonel has become unhinged, obsessive (underlined by some Dutch camera angles). So, too, has Labiche, albeit in a different way: he doesn’t seem to care much about the paintings in themselves, but all his rage at the Nazi occupation becomes focused on Waldheim’s art train.

Lancaster makes a great French hero in the style of actors like Jean Gabin; his Labiche is a strong and assertive but not attention-seeking man, pensive and self-contained but not navel-gazing, and intensely physical when he needs to be: the actor did all his own stunts (as well as his own railway engineering) for The Train, the fourth of five films he would make with Frankenheimer, a couple of years later than The Birdman of Alcatraz (1962) and released in the same year as Seven Days in May.

Scofield is more flamboyant as Waldheim, only his third screen role, though not excessively so—he certainly brings into play all the usual traits of movie Nazis (ruthlessness, arrogance and so on) but manages to keep just on the right side of cliché, not overdoing Waldheim’s fascist zealotry and not letting us see until the very end how completely, impractically fixated he is on the art train. Jean Bouchaud, by contrast, seems to be having a bit of fun in playing the Nazi stereotype to the hilt in the smaller part of Schmidt, a more junior officer, while the character of the stationmaster played by Jacques Marin actually employs comedy-Frenchman tropes himself to persuade the Nazis that he’s harmless.

Jeanne Moreau is excellent as Christine, a hotelkeeper who—echoing Labiche’s earlier lack of enthusiasm for stopping the art train—claims not to be interested in resistance at all, but nevertheless comes through. There is a celebratory aspect here to The Train, which is certainly not a film of flag-waving patriotism: the French characters are frequently not over-keen to be heroic but still do their bit. (Incidentally, though Frankenheimer and some other key personnel were American, it’s not unreasonable to claim The Train as partially a French film. It was shot entirely in France—partly because French funding required it—while the French actors spoke their own language and were dubbed into English, though this is barely noticeable. A French-language version was also released.)

Moreau’s part is rather small, however, and it’s difficult not to think it was a case of shoehorning in a potential love interest for Labiche (never developed, and in fact the film barely touches on anyone’s private life at all). The most memorable among the minor roles, instead, is that of Boule (Michel Simon)—an irascible older railway engineer who, like the stationmaster, might seem comic at first, but turns out to be just as serious as Labiche. Boule describes himself as “too old to be careful” towards the Germans, and it’s an interesting little touch in the writing of The Train that the French are frequently seen answering back without attracting retaliation; perhaps their confidence is growing, and the Germans’ sapping, as the end of the occupation approaches?

With such a fine cast and such moral conflicts, The Train might sound character-led but in truth it isn’t at all. As befits a film so much of which is about a system (the railway), most if not all of the individual characters are ultimately just cogs in the storyline and could easily be omitted or changed without altering its essential thrust. Much more important to The Train than any individual performance, excepting perhaps Lancaster’s, is the quasi-realistic style of filming: Frankenheimer said “the key to it was that it had to look like a documentary”, and it often does.

The trains were real—no models—and exteriors were shot on location in France, though sometimes, of course, one place stood in for another. For example, the station identified as Vaires in the film was actually one some 50 miles away. The overwhelming sense is of greyness: fog, dirt, smoke, puddles, trash. Gerald Pratley, in his comprehensive book on Frankenheimer, called it “one of the few war films that conveys a true sense of period”, and it certainly feels far less designed than many. Messy details like the bits of scrap metal littering a bench in a railway workshop add to the verisimilitude, as does filming in black-and-white; it was around this time that colour movies finally became the majority, but the artificial-feeling colour of the period would have been wholly wrong for the impression Frankenheimer was trying to create.

Like a good documentary, it also spends enough time on detail that we understand exactly what is going on. This is seen, for instance, in the numerous shots of train points (switches) being changed, or in the well-choreographed scene where Labiche sneaks out of Christine’s hotel past a German guard, though it has to be said that the film is not so articulate at explaining the larger-scale geography—where the different stations lie in relation to each other, to Paris and to Germany, for example.

The score by Maurice Jarre is appropriately restrained, too. He had by this stage in his career fully embraced the “big tunes” that Hollywood and the British favoured but French critics tended to dislike, and strong melodies do emerge in the opening credits, but they never come dominantly to the fore as they do in his writing for David Lean’s Lawrence of Arabia (1962), for example. Instead, the music works in the background to build tension, sometimes also offering an airier counterbalance to the rather grim and spatially constricted atmosphere of many scenes.

Yet though The Train has some documentarian flavour, Frankenheimer’s direction frequently goes in the other direction. He’s not self-consciously aesthetic, but he is free-wheeling in his use of the camera, exploiting all the technical resources available to him. He is not at all afraid of the artificiality involved in camera angles which show no plausible human point of view—frequently multiple different ones in a single scene, especially inventive in the constrained space of a locomotive cab, or shots at ground level emphasising the train tracks. The result of this and some quite rapid cuts is a dynamic power far removed from the “point the camera at the subject and stay still” approach of many documentaries; The Train is a film of often unexpected vitality, unexpected because it contrasts so much with the downbeat tone, and a great showcase of the director’s (and cinematographer’s and editor’s) craft.

At times it’s sensational: 30 train cars and 14 cameras were destroyed for an explosion sequence where the sheer energy of explosives throwing up the earth is galvanising. This was filmed at a real station due to be demolished, Gargenville (sometimes referred to in writing on The Train as “Jardin Ville” but this seems to derive from a mishearing, or misremembering, of “Gargenville” by Frankenheimer), and is equally remarkable for what it doesn’t depict: “I’m so tired of shots of planes dropping bombs, so I did the entire air raid without showing a single aircraft,” Frankenheimer recalled. Other highlights, though, do include a Spitfire attack on a train, as well as slow, slow train crashes.

Scenes like these—and a hellscape-ish burning railway station—display the ability of the then-young director (who had started out as an assistant to Sidney Lumet) to think big, but many less spectacular touches are equally assured. See, for example, the way that a crowded office scene early on is filmed so that Waldheim subtly stands out, or the magnificent shot of the station at “Vaires” about 27-minutes in. Here, we see the train stretched out, facing the camera; to the right is a large station building with a jagged roofline receding into the distance (so much more interesting than an ordinary roof); on the left, railway tracks head off toward vanishing point, with poles providing vertical punctuation. All this is static, and Frankenheimer’s final touch is a group of men crossing the track at right angles to the train, adding movement to a truly masterful composition.

Much more mobile and equally impressive is the sequence of about nine minutes toward the end where Labiche, now on his own, is preparing to ambush the train while the Germans hunt him. Again, Frankenheimer employs a huge range of shots here (this whole sequence would be an interesting case study in filming action). The physicality is all-consuming—we feel Labiche’s effort when he starts loosening components of the track—and the decision to have him suddenly roll rather than run down a hill is a stroke of genius, taking the audience completely by surprise while also recalling a much earlier scene where he slides down a ladder.

The Train wasn’t a huge box office success, though it did better in France and the UK than in the US and was generally well received by critics. Bosley Crowther in The New York Times called it “realistic and intensely engrossing” at the time, but perhaps the most perceptive praise came later from the director Guillermo del Toro in an interview: “It’s a perfect movie. It works at every level, as a piece of craftsmanship and as an artistic piece about how much art is worth in human lives. It’s all about movement—the central motif is a machine that never stops moving, and the movie is very much like the train: unstoppable, impressive and massive.”   

On the surface, The Train belongs to the sub-genre of films about French resistance to the Nazis as well as to the tradition of French railway films, two strands that had already been notably joined by René Clément’s La Bataille du Rail (1946). It’s also a telling of a partly true story. But it goes way beyond genre and beyond factuality.

Indeed, though the way that the cargo of artworks represents France’s soul certainly adds to the film’s resonance, as Crowther pointed out, the art is ultimately only a reason for the story, rather than the essence of it. And as much as the art represents France, the train represents the Third Reich: when another officer tells Waldheim towards the end that “it’s hopeless”, he’s clearly referring to Germany’s war as well as the condition of the train (probably even the character himself is aware of this). Waldheim’s stubborn refusal to give up on the train even when it evidently is never going to get to Germany exemplifies how easily determination can turn into folly.

The “good guys” aren’t idealised either. The Train is partly a film about heroism, pitting a small group against a far larger, far better-resourced one—but it tempers this with a good deal of cynicism. The liberation of Paris is delayed so that a French division can be first to enter the city: no doubt politically and symbolically necessary, but a gesture that comes at a cost. At one point, the artworks have to be saved not from the Germans, but from the Allies (ironically, by painting the train cars themselves so Allied bombers will spare them). At another, Labiche grows so angry he wants to destroy the train, which would defeat the purpose of everything he and his companions have achieved so far.

This is the idiocy to which war leads, The Train is saying. And the ending is ambiguous, at least as far as the two main characters are concerned. There’s no big speech from Labiche of the kind that most films might fall back on; exactly what he and Waldheim respectively feel by this stage, what they are actually fighting for now, is uncertain. Again, there’s implied commentary on war itself.

Arthur Penn, who worked on the film very briefly before being replaced by Frankenheimer, reportedly would have made more of the characters’ inner lives. But the brilliance of Frankenheimer’s film is that he doesn’t: he gives us just enough to provoke interest in what makes Labiche or Waldheim tick, enough to make us wonder, but leaves the answers tantalisingly obscure. Perhaps the point is that individual people’s feelings really don’t make much difference when they’re caught up in an all-encompassing conflict like these men; in any case, while some action movies make an embarrassingly superficial attempt at profundity, The Train goes in the opposite direction, giving us plenty to think about without resorting to overtly “meaningful” scenes.

Frankenheimer followed The Train with an entirely different yet equally powerful film, the strange and unsettling sci-fi horror Seconds (1966). He would go on to direct across a wide range of genres, from sports (1966’s Grand Prix) to horror (1979’s Prophecy) although always with a strong emphasis on the thriller; he made some fine movies and he made some duds (1985’s The Holcroft Covenant comes to mind). But if The Train was the only film he ever made, it would be enough to confirm his directorial skill. It’s beautifully made, absolutely gripping, and that rare thing, a great action movie with intelligence.

FRANCE • ITALY • USA | 1964 | 133 MINUTES | 1.66:1 | BLACK & WHITE | ENGLISH • GERMAN • (SEPARATE FRENCH VERSION)

Cast & Crew

director: John Frankenheimer.
writers: Franklin Coen & Frank Davis (loosely based on the memoir ‘Le Front de l’Art: Défense des Collections Françaises, 1939-1945’ by Rose Valland).
starring: Burt Lancaster, Paul Scofield, Jeanne Moreau, Suzanne Flon, Michel Simon, Wolfgang Preiss & Albert Rémy.