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(More customer reviews)When Burt Lancaster called on director John Frankeheimer yet again to rescue another picture from another director who had left the project, the call took Frankenheimer to Paris to bring his brilliant black and white extreme depth of focus shots to bear on thought provoking subject matter.
La Bisch, the unwilling resistance man late in WWII (Lancaster) is pitted despite his objections against a cultured German general who is attempting to take every painted masterpiece out of Paris that can be found.
Knowing that delays to shipment in the face of the german retreat and allied advance, La Bisch uses both ingenuity and enormous physical effort to attempt to block the movement of a train laden with stolen art, eastbound from Paris.
The plot twists are the stuff of legend, and each twist provokes controversial positions regarding the importance of art and the brevity of human life.
The long shot action scenes in this film are brilliant, and Lancaster, who was injured during filming, performs much of the extraordinary scenes in the movie with a real (not feigned) limp.
Fine ensemble cast, including many of the best French character actors of the time, a serious script saved by brevity from the melodramatic and arguably the best camerawork and editing of any action film in history (you read right) make this film superior to Frankenheimer's other B&W films from the period (e.g., The Manchurian Candidate and even The Birdman of Alcatraz).
The Train belongs in any serious English language cine collection. This is one of the top 100 films of all time.
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Paris, August 1944. With the Allied army closing in, German commander and art fanatic Colonel von Waldheim (Paul Scofield) steals a vast collection of rare French paintings and loads them onto a train bound for Berlin. But when a beloved French patriot is murdered while trying to sabotage von Waldheim's scheme, Labiche (Burt Lancaster), a stalwart member of the Resistance, vows to stop the train at any cost. Calling upon his vast arsenal of skills, Labiche unleashes a torrent of devastation anddestructionloosened rails, shattered tracks and head-on collisionsin an impassioned, suspense-filled quest for justice, retribution and revenge.Inspired by an actual event and highlighted by spectacular stuntwork and visual effects, The Train is "an edge-of-your-seat, thrilling, suspenseful and superior film" (The Motion Picture Guide).
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