The Train (1964, John Frankenheimer) (Patreon)

83/100

Second viewing, last seen 1996 (during MoMA's Frankenheimer retro, immediately following Seconds—pretty good night at the movies). I'm gonna potentially alienate my hardcore-cinephile "base" by calling this the Argo of its day, and insisting that I don't mean to diminish it by doing so. Same basic idea, really: Let's take an important but fundamentally bureaucratic historical event and make it 100x more exciting than what actually happened, inventing action setpieces from whole cloth. Fine by me when skillfully executed, and The Train boasts a superb mix of kineticism (with Lancaster frequently doing his own stunts, including one remarkable continuous shot in which he shimmies down a tall ladder using only his hands and then leaps aboard a train that's genuinely moving at a decent clip), pyrotechnics, and good old-fashioned smash-'em-up. For those (like me) who prefer ingenuity to spectacle, there's also a wealth of clever misdirection, from Labiche sabotaging a switch with his Nazi commander's mislaid pipe to the epic multi-city ruse that disguises various French railway stations so that the Germans can't see that they're traveling in the wrong direction. And there's real pathos in the failures en route, e.g. Papa Boule sealing his death warrant because he can't bring himself to throw good money away. (Michel Simon's so ideally cast here that I'll live with many of his lines having been poorly dubbed.) When Frankenheimer, having previously established that a bombing raid will commence at precisely 10am, slowly zooms into a Nazi's wristwatch during what had appeared to be a bellowing-orders-on-the-phone shot, it's hard not to bemoan the paucity of basic visual imagination that we're stuck with nowadays. So simple, so effective.

Thus far I've described quite a good movie (yes, better than Argo), but in fact The Train is a great one, by virtue of exploring the age-old philosophical question about the relative value of ordinary human lives and irreplaceable masterpieces. Often this gets formulated as some variation on "If you could only save either some anonymous person or (say) the complete works of Shakespeare, which would you choose?" Apparently, Arthur Penn, the film's original director, intended to foreground that debate, which is why Lancaster (seeking a post-Leopard box-office hit) had him fired...and maybe Penn's version would've been terrific, who knows? As it turns out, though, the Train that actually arrived successfully compresses everything that's necessary into its phenomenal opening and closing scenes. My first note is the single word "reverence," referring to Colonel Von Waldheim's solo nocturnal tour of the museum—his careful, deliberate steps; his ardent gaze; his slight hesitation before daring to switch on a light. Even before Villard shows up to say so aloud, it's obvious how much Waldheim treasures these paintings, at least partially humanizing him in our eyes. Significantly, though, while we spend the rest of the movie watching countless people sacrifice themselves for the contents of those crates, they never get re-opened. In the final seconds, Waldheim berates Labiche as a Philistine who can't appreciate the genius he's risked his life to protect, and Labiche's response (pointedly following a glance at the pile of murdered hostages behind him) at once confirms and denies that accusation. Art belongs to everyone ("our cultural heritage," people keeping saying), not merely to snobbish (and evil) self-appointed elites...but Waldheim's words unmistakably hit home, and Labiche walks away from priceless Picassos and Renoirs with the defeated gait of a man who's accomplished his goal and achieved nothing. Packing that ethical quagmire into a few minutes at the beginning and end of a first-rate thrill ride is one hell of an achievement. 

(Ryan Wu, I'd like to say thank you on behalf of the group and ourselves and I hope we've passed the audition.)