The Train

Saw The Train, a film about a daring heist, saving the art treasures of France from the hands of those wicked, wicked Nazis. The paintings are being transported by train and it's up to the plucky French resistance to save them in the nick of time, just before the allies liberate France. The film apparently began life as a meditation on why the French were so willing to sacrifice many lives to save these paintings, but a re-write soon took care of that snooze-fest. It is now an action film, full of excitement and last-minute successes and maddening failures. The result is incredibly gripping and exciting.

I, in my infinite pretension, would have preferred the original film, but there are traces of the original for the interested viewer. Several times the protagonist's mission, to save the art even at the cost of human lives, is challenged and almost always these challenges are delivered by the Nazi antagonist, a refined but perhaps decadent art-appreciator. He's almost a sympathetic figure at first but of course we are only let to see his soft underbelly so that his later brutality may be made all the more grotesque.

So, original film aside, this was a very exciting and good film. It uses the dark coal dust of the train yard to great effect, the protagonist's teeth shining out of the darkness in a clenched grimace. The tense chase and sabotage scenes are as good as anything that Hitchcock ever shot. The film never really becomes more than a beautiful waste of time, I feel, but it's reaching so points for effort. A nice, tight, exciting film with little glimmers, here and there, of a brilliant work of art.