The Train (1964)
A tightly compressed idea stretched into a small epic of a movie. It's actually quite absorbing if you don't expect anything terribly original or exuberant. The key player is Burt Lancaster, who has a physical, heroic role, often with few words, and he pulls it off with grit and intelligence. There are caricatures in the cast, almost inevitably--the Nazi officers with arrogance and cold determination, the French villagers who have wit and warmth and a spirit to win--but it's part of what these movies need, almost, to be classic WWII movies.
This is almost a late entry into the second big boom in war flicks in the early 1960s, and this one, for all its black and white ambition, is rather intimate by comparison. The twist is the good guys are out to save some European artworks, masterpieces the Germans want to get into Germany before the war ends. It's solid and steady, well made by a great director from the time (John Frankenheimer, who did "Manchurian Candidate" among others) a shadow of some other war films, but it has an integrity of its own that WWII fans will appreciate.
A tightly compressed idea stretched into a small epic of a movie. It's actually quite absorbing if you don't expect anything terribly original or exuberant. The key player is Burt Lancaster, who has a physical, heroic role, often with few words, and he pulls it off with grit and intelligence. There are caricatures in the cast, almost inevitably--the Nazi officers with arrogance and cold determination, the French villagers who have wit and warmth and a spirit to win--but it's part of what these movies need, almost, to be classic WWII movies.
This is almost a late entry into the second big boom in war flicks in the early 1960s, and this one, for all its black and white ambition, is rather intimate by comparison. The twist is the good guys are out to save some European artworks, masterpieces the Germans want to get into Germany before the war ends. It's solid and steady, well made by a great director from the time (John Frankenheimer, who did "Manchurian Candidate" among others) a shadow of some other war films, but it has an integrity of its own that WWII fans will appreciate.