Spotlight

Spotlight Date: 4-July-10
Spoiler Rating: Medium

The Train (1964)

An amusing story from ancient Greece tells of one city that was receiving envoys from another. Looking to impress their guests (as an admonitory show of strength more than an expression of civic pride, I believe), the citizens gathered all their collective wealth in jewelry, textiles, and tableware and laid it out at the first house on the visit. Then, as the guests made their way through the streets with a slow-talking guide, the citizens snatched up the riches and ran through back alleys to the next house on the visit. And so on through the town, giving the impression that every house was richly furnished when in fact the same pile of loot was displayed at each one.

A section in the middle of The Train reminds me of this story. A doughty group of French railroad men, whose leader is played by Burt Lancaster, enact an elaborate ruse upon a troop of occupying Nazis, whose leader is played by Paul Scofield. When Lancaster is ordered to drive a train into Germany under cover of night, yardmen at multiple depots shift switches and hang false signs to trick the Nazis into believing that the train is headed east when it is actually heading southwest. It is always satisfying to see Nazis thwarted in movies, and Scofield's colonel is particularly deserving of a nose-thumbing act of defiance. Chalk one up for guys with gumption!

Not all of The Train is amusing triumph, however. Much slaughter and sacrifice is involved in keeping the Germans from their goal. There is a good bit of suspense and action, with Lancaster notably performing his own stunts, and a fair amount of detail about the railroad business, which is quite interesting. There is also an uneasy sense of class distinction and futility. The cargo that Scofield so desperately wants to deliver to his motherland (desperately because he knows the war is nearly over) consists of France's art treasures, paintings by Renoir, Cezanne, Picasso, etc. His aesthetic drive, twisted as all things by the swastika on his arm, is unknown to the blue-collar men who oppose him. When Lancaster is initially approached by a curator begging him to sabotage the train for a few days until the Allies arrive, his answer is No. He is pulled into the project by his more reckless crew and becomes as obsessed as Scofield out of a stubborn resolve to finish what he started and a hatred of Nazi brutality. A question hovers behind their rivalry which the movie does not neatly answer: Is art as important as people, even when it helps define a culture? Was it worth so many lives to stop the train? This consideration adds complexity to what is essentially an action/war hero film.

Copyright © 2010 The Jujube (M. I. Kim). All rights reserved.