"The Train" is really two films spot-welded together to form a great shambling hybrid.
One is a rumination on the value of art and the power it holds over man, to the point they would sacrifice everything and everyone for it. This is the film Arthur Penn envisioned when he signed on, with the titular train not even leaving the station until 90 minutes in. So of course he got fired after a few days.
The other, the one John Frankenheimer railroaded into theaters for the price of final cut and a Ferrari, is a slam-bang action machine that turns the art into a near MacGuffin. To be fair, the philosophical aspects still play a major part, particularly in a brilliant final scene. But what people wanted to see - and Burt Lancaster wanted to give them - was a taste of chaos as his French resistance fighter messes with Paul Scofield's Nazi and his stolen art fetish. And Frankenheimer more than stepped up.
CGI might be the cheaper and safer way to do special effects, but nothing can ever match the awe, the legitimacy of things done live. Everything that gets bombed to pieces in glorious wide-angle black-and-white is real. Every train crash, some in frightening proximity to the camera, is real. Lancaster looks exhausted because he damn well is exhausted after log-rolling down that hill, and Scofield looks grotesque when his sweat-drenched face contorts in pure Aryan rage as he heedlessly pays the price of his obsessions. More than anything, The Train has a tangible feel of danger, of exertion, of scale. Wars aren't won in grand charges and passionate rallying cries; they're won through force of will and sweat and blood, maybe even tears as machines literal and allegorical run right over everything in their way. And they're never without appalling cost. Who cares about the art compared to the lives thrown away in its service?
If the film sacrifices some emotional complexity for two hours and change of relentless spectacle (and is almost certainly not how the real events occurred), that spectacle embodies its own brand of emotion. It's exhilarating cinema, the sheer muchness of it all up there on the screen. This is the kind of film that will almost certainly never be made again - we've largely forgotten how with all the shortcuts and alternatives and drive toward safe profits. And cinema is the poorer for it.
One is a rumination on the value of art and the power it holds over man, to the point they would sacrifice everything and everyone for it. This is the film Arthur Penn envisioned when he signed on, with the titular train not even leaving the station until 90 minutes in. So of course he got fired after a few days.
The other, the one John Frankenheimer railroaded into theaters for the price of final cut and a Ferrari, is a slam-bang action machine that turns the art into a near MacGuffin. To be fair, the philosophical aspects still play a major part, particularly in a brilliant final scene. But what people wanted to see - and Burt Lancaster wanted to give them - was a taste of chaos as his French resistance fighter messes with Paul Scofield's Nazi and his stolen art fetish. And Frankenheimer more than stepped up.
CGI might be the cheaper and safer way to do special effects, but nothing can ever match the awe, the legitimacy of things done live. Everything that gets bombed to pieces in glorious wide-angle black-and-white is real. Every train crash, some in frightening proximity to the camera, is real. Lancaster looks exhausted because he damn well is exhausted after log-rolling down that hill, and Scofield looks grotesque when his sweat-drenched face contorts in pure Aryan rage as he heedlessly pays the price of his obsessions. More than anything, The Train has a tangible feel of danger, of exertion, of scale. Wars aren't won in grand charges and passionate rallying cries; they're won through force of will and sweat and blood, maybe even tears as machines literal and allegorical run right over everything in their way. And they're never without appalling cost. Who cares about the art compared to the lives thrown away in its service?
If the film sacrifices some emotional complexity for two hours and change of relentless spectacle (and is almost certainly not how the real events occurred), that spectacle embodies its own brand of emotion. It's exhilarating cinema, the sheer muchness of it all up there on the screen. This is the kind of film that will almost certainly never be made again - we've largely forgotten how with all the shortcuts and alternatives and drive toward safe profits. And cinema is the poorer for it.