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War's winding railway, its treasures and casualties. Paris on the "1511th day of German occupation" is the starting point, "degenerate art" is the Nazi plunder as troops disband. (Crates leave the museum adorned with names like Cézanne and Degas and Matisse, "the national heritage" as confiscated loot.) The obsessed colonel (Paul Scofield) leads the pillaging, the train taking the cargo into Germany is operated by an irritable resistance fighter (Burt Lancaster), and there you have the crux of John Frankenheimer's grid, aesthete versus saboteur. A refined tragic view, the human cost of irreplaceable legacy: "Your horizon is about to be broadened." The coin in the oil line and the camera inches away from derailed wheels, all part of the choreography of metal and smoke, Lancaster zigzags through it like Keaton on a tear. Hiding in a tunnel from an air raid, the locomotive lets out a piercing whistle of wrath; later, a Nazi officer is roused from sleep and opens a door to behold an unmanned caboose heading his way (cf. The Wild Bunch). "Men want to be heroes, and then their women mourn," laments the innkeeper (Jeanne Moreau) caught in the thick of things, France's weary voice. Frankenheimer in full command, iron behemoths deftly maneuvered on crisscrossing lines of movement and a fine flash of Gance's La Roue in the accelerated montage of the climactic collusion. (In the middle of the bustle and the explosions, the magic effect of Michel Simon's eyes lighting up warmly at the mention of Renoir.) A ripping system of combustible spectacle and moral quandary. "Beauty belongs to the man who can appreciate it," a key line in the showdown strewn with corpses and canvases. Consequences extend to Éloge de l'amour and Inglourious Basterds. Cinematography by Jean Tournier and Walter Wottitz. With Suzanne Flon, Wolfgang Preiss, Albert Rémy, Charles Millot, Richard Münch, Jacques Marin, and Howard Vernon. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |