The Lake Theater on State Street in Painesville was the Taj Mahal to me. It was dark and filled with endless magics. Sounds no mortal ever heard: the choking gurgle of a thuggee victim being strangled for the love of Kali; the special whimpering bark as Lassie told some halfwit nit of a child actor that the baby was in a burning building; the insidious laugh of Victor Jory as The Shadow; the thunk of crossbow arrows plonking into the drawbridge of evil King John. Sights no mortal ever beheld: Sabu changed into a dog by Conrad Veidt; Wild Bill Elliott as Red Ryder, beating the shit out of a gang of bullies somehow vaguely reminiscent of the thugs that played in the schoolyard of Lathrop Grade School; Kirk Alyn leaping off a building shouting, "Up, up, and awayyyy!" There was no end to the magic to be found in that dark cavern.
For four hours—with Bingo and two features and three cartoons and a TravelTalk and a singalong—I was in Heaven. A special dark Heaven even more private than the bathroom, which is the only place a little kid can go to, to be alone.
And I knew some day I would have adventures like that. Some day I would walk streets paved with gold, and all the bullies would step off into the gutter when I passed, and my Mother and Father would say, "The kid really knows how to live," because I'd be in business for myself, and even if my partner Miles Archer had been murdered and I didn't know whether the fat man or Joel Cairo had the black bird, even so . . . I'd be competent and tough, and I'd win out.
That was how it was when I was a kid.
Is there nobility in the moviegoing experience? Don't ask me, friend. I don't know from nobility; all I know from is survival and dreams.
And thank you, Val Lewton.
CINEMA [1965–68]
THE TRAIN
Melville once ventured, "No great and enduring volume can ever be written on the flea, though many there be who have tried it." Even when the flea is photographed in Technicolor and CinemaScope, its volume is a flashy but transitory offering. Melville dealt with whales, consequently.
Unlike most of the flea-marketeers of Hollywood, director John Frankenheimer is a man who would deal with whales, had he his choice. It is the choice of the louse as opposed to the air-breather. And in so doing, his sphere of attention becomes more cerebral, the purview of his cinematic documents ceases to be merely entertainment (which is that matter lightly dropped on the viewer, like tapioca pudding, e.g., Doris Day flicks) and becomes "art" (which entails active participation and, like a steak, mastication).
The Train is art, and as a result, many things can be said of it, not the least of which is that it is a good picture. In fact, it may be too good for the people who will eventually decide whether or not it is successful, at the box office. This is, I feel, a sin not of the producer, but of the culture, of the motion picture—goer. In the main, he has been surfeited with such an endless glut of pap films—usually because these were the ones he patronized most in the past, thus by his attentions demanding more of the same, and getting no better than he deserved—that a film of some depth and contrast leaves him confused and disgruntled; and rather than acknowledging that his imaginative faculties have atrophied, as with Lord Jim, Dr. Strangelove and half a hundred other superlative films, he will condemn the work set before him. It is a hideous conceit.
And I fear The Train will be another victim.
Behind and beside me in the theater, during the special screening, safe in the dark to express remarks of denseness and silliness that a lighted room would either force them to rationalize as "opinions" or keep unspoken, I heard typical moviegoers ask each other what the hell was going on up there, at points in the film any relatively cogent and informed person should have found self-explanatory. Again, I assert, this is not the fault of Frankenheimer & Co. but of The Great Unwashed (a term of surpassing arrogance and disdain I have hesitated to use before, but which seems frighteningly applicable here). And the answer to the problem is beyond me: the filmmaker can either pander to this Howdy Doody mentality, and bring forth an endless stream of Fanny Hurst/Gidget/Tammy/Ross Hunter charades, or go his way as has Frankenheimer or Kubrick or Richardson and woo his own Muse, letting the stock options fall where they may.
The latter course is one of courage, for it entails risk, loss of financing, and the roar of corporation executives. It is to Frankenheimer's eternal credit that he did not take the easy way out for, to repeat, The Train is a work of brilliance, perceptivity, depth and meaning. It approaches questions of morality and conscience that demand grappling. In short, this film, unlike much of what makes money these seasons, does not pass through the viewer like beets through a baby's backside.
Set in Paris, 1944, with the Allies always just "a few days away from liberation" of the open city, a small group of French Resistance operatives set themselves the task of rescuing a trainload of art treasures, masterpieces, "the heritage of France," from being shipped to Germany by the Nazi Colonel who has, for four years, pathologically kept the paintings from being damaged, ostensibly because they are convertible to gold needed for the war effort, but in reality because he is a man possessed of taste and discrimination, a man awed by the genius unleashed on those canvases by Matisse, Braque, Van Gogh, Gauguin, Monet, Manet, Picasso. His one single driving thought is to get those irreplaceable treasures away. He is a dedicated man, a man with lofty motives, serving a beast master, and himself part-beast.
He is a man doing the wrong thing—for the right reason.
His opposite number is a man of controlled brutishness, a Parisian railroadman named Labiche, who counts the cost of sabotage in human lives. X number of lives to stop this train, X number for that train. Only the most valuable trains—munitions, troops, etc.—are worth expending the lives of his fellow saboteurs. He rejects the plea of the drab little Frenchwoman (sensitively played by Suzanne Flon, who will be best remembered, perhaps, as Lautrec's mannequin love in Moulin Rouge) who has been Colonel Von Waldheim's assistant, to stop the Colonel from ferreting away with the golden heart of French culture. Paintings mean nothing to him; there's a war on; what has art to do with it? Not until Von Waldheim executes old Papa Boule, the engineer Labiche has assigned to the train, for trying to sabotage the locomotive pulling that fabulous cargo, does Labiche swear to stop the train. But still, the paintings mean nothing to him. Crated in their boxcars—7 Van Gogh, they are stenciled, or 4 Roualt, like herring, like machine parts, like piece goods—they are merely a symbol of frenzy to Labiche.
He will stop the train, he will defeat the Nazi, Von Waldheim. And therein lies the beautiful dichotomy of the story.
Because he is doing the right thing—for the wrong reason!
In essence, this 133-minute film is a titanic duel between the personalities of Von Waldheim: dedicated, brutal, ascetic, implacable yet sensitive, determined . . . and Labiche: physical, vengeful, cunning, artless yet graceful, equally determined. And while the paintings mean nothing to Labiche, they mean everything to Von Waldheim, they are his obsession.
In the final moments of the film, after a staggering loss of life over the inanimate cargo, when the battle has been won, Von Waldheim, even then, is able to tell Labiche that the paintings are his, will always be his, will always belong to him or a man like him, to men with the eyes to see beauty. He tells Labiche that he has won, but without even knowing why, or what he was doing, that the paintings mean as much to Labiche as a string of pearls to an ape.
And Labiche looks at the jumbled jackstraw tumble of French hostages Von Waldheim has had machine-gunned off the train, and kills the Nazi. The camera spastically intercuts between the jumbled crates of great paintings half-unloaded from the derailed train, and the dead Frenchmen. Cut and intercut, and only a dolt could fail to see the unspoken question: Were these paintings worth all these wasted lives?
It is a breathless visual posture of Frankenheimer as master of his craft, as symbolist, as preacher, as capturer of art for the masses, that does not demean the intellectual's praise. It sums up one of the basic questions of man in conflict with himself
to preserve culture and civilization:
Is the life of a man greater or lesser than the art he produces in his most noble moments? Is it possible to equate the continued value of history and cultural heritage his finest work represents, weighed against common flesh, mortal clay? It is a question to which philosophers have only imperfect answers, and in restating the question in modern, cinematic, bold terms, Frankenheimer (and I would presume scenarists Franklin Coen and Frank Davis) has rendered a service. For more than entertainment has been provided, for those who would care to exercise their wit and intelligence.
Even serendipitously, this film provides marginal treasures, unexpected, and easy to love: a visual paean to the "high iron" of steam locomotion, a reverence for the filth and sweat and bravery of men who pushed the steam horses; a sensation of grandeur the diesel engineers of today cannot possibly feel about their semisilent zip-machines. It is a final hurrah voiced in closeups of sooty engines, long shots down on marshaling yards, pans and zooms to and away from specific bits of iron that speak of the majesty of the whistle-screeching, thunder-making days of railroading, now almost entirely passed into history.
And more: England's incomparable Paul Scofield as the many-faceted Nazi Colonel, rendering a portrayal of complexity and even—impossibly—compassion, with a minimum of arm-waving, with a reserve of style that bespeaks great talent. His every moment on the screen is a gesture of possession; he strides across this film as palpably impressive as the train itself, and in time, the train dwindles in import, and the man trying to rule it becomes the central figure of the drama, despite the plotting of script which offers us Burt Lancaster as Labiche. Correction. It offers us
Burt Lancaster as Captain Marvel.
When I was a child, and read the Capt. Marvel comics, I never really thought any harm would come to that great red cheese. He could always pull off something, after all, he was superhuman, wasn't he? My feeling was paralleled with Lancaster as I watched this film. He can act, certainly, but on what level above that of swashbuckling, I cannot conceive. The usual Lancasterite mannerisms—the clenched teeth, the balled fist swung across the body, the spread-legged stance and the furiously shaken arm, the tossed curls, all so damnably typical and cliche, so useless and needless here, in a setting of purest gold—the same mannerisms of Elmer Gantry, once again, for the millionth time restated.
The intrusive personality of Lancaster the acrobat, doing his special parlor tricks down ladders, over garden walls, superbly muscled and annoying as hell when they tell us over and over, "I'm not really Labiche, I'm Lancaster."
It is to Frankenheimer's credit that he has been able to direct around this more-than-minuscule handicap. His direction (blessedly done in black and white, precisely what the production demanded) is massive, great blocks of shadow and light, a study in chiaroscuro; dark, jagged, dense, swung with great authority, like the railroad crane needed to lift the wrecked locomotive off the tracks. Purposely ponderous at times, quicksilver here and gone at other times. He has filmed it with what might be termed "affectionate realism," a sense of proportion and piety that transcends mere naturalism, that lingers on the proper things for the proper amount of time.
Scofield, Jeanne Moreau, the Falstaffian Michel Simon as Papa Boule, Wolfgang Preiss adding another memorable characterization to his already-illustrious career with his portrayal of the Nazi railroad specialist Major Herren, muffin-shaped Albert Remy as the fellow-saboteur of Labiche, striking to the heart of the film's meaning with his gentle, skillful rendering of a simple peasant patriot . . . all of them lend tone and dignity and artistry to a film of notable proportions.
The Train is a success. It succeeds not only on its own terms, but on the greater, more stringent, terms of strictest art criticism. It is a film of purity, it is even a loftier breed of "entertainment," and it deserves all the praise and attention we can give it.
Simply, it is a film not to be missed.
It is the whale, and not the flea.
Cinema / July–August 1965
VON RYAN'S EXPRESS
There is a grand tradition of the adventure film. In many ways it is a dichotomy: some of the worst films of all time have been the most memorable adventures; conversely, some of the best-made adventure films die hideous box-office deaths, and live even shorter lives in memory. King Kong, Korda's Four Feathers and The Thief of Bagdad leap instantly to mind, and in more recent times The Magnificent Seven, Lawrence of Arabia and even as flawed an epic as The Vikings—all prove the latter point, while we may take as example of the former almost anything Samuel Bronston has released in the past ten years.
Because of this body of history to the larger-than-life film of derring-do, comparison intrudes itself. And in the case of 20th's Von Ryan's Express the comparison must inevitably be with The Great Escape, an adventure film of undeniable stature. The comparison is not altogether unwarranted, nor unrewarding. For if Von Ryan's Express comes out short in some areas, it makes the points up in others.
Late 1943, an Italian prison camp, run about as slipshodly as the entire Italian war. A camp filled with almost a thousand English troops, into whose midst comes a downed American Air Force Colonel, Ryan. The English officer-in-command has died the night before, so Ryan automatically becomes the ranking officer in the compound. He immediately raises the ire of the limeys by exposing their tunnels and escape procedures in exchange for medicine, clothing, showers, razors, all the basics kept from them by the Commandant as retaliation for their continued escape attempts. Inevitably, Italy surrenders, the prisoners take to the land before the Nazis move in, and are recaptured due to a humanitarian blunder on the part of Ryan. To make amends, he promptly steals the entire prison train, and runs it through Pauline peril after Pauline peril till they make it free to Switzerland. Ryan is killed in the process. But he does die a hero.
For the first third of the film, tedium is the keynote. About midway, the pace accelerates, due largely to the splendid performances of Edward Mulhare as the vicar impersonating a German officer, and Sergio Fantoni as the one-eyed Italian captain who helps the Ryan Express. As the denouement fast approaches, conjurings of The Bridge on the River Kwai and The Guns of Navarone swell, and never seem to be quite washed away, no matter how long the triggers of those German machine-pistols are held.
If the film is not a total success, blame lies, it seems to me, with director Mark Robson, who has once again demonstrated a pedestrian pace most clearly seen in his Nine Hours to Rama. The direction seems uninspired, matter-of-fact, strictly pronunciatory, without verve or dash or any of the bravura techniques such bravura plotting would seem to demand. It is, in many ways, a tale of danger and excitement, told by a man with the soul of a ribbon clerk. It has the same teeth-gnashing effect of a good joke, badly told.
And yet, the film manages to hold the attention, at least during the last two-thirds. It is to be hoped that the producers will see fit to trim the opening to embolden the pace.
The values of Von Ryan's Express, however, are serendipitous. The first is a conclusion about current war films, the second about the nature of the "star" system.
There seems to be a heartening—and totally inexplicable—trend toward films that point a shaft of rationality at the concept of "heroism" during wartime. Heartening, if one is to read the daily papers, and inexplicable in a time of Birching, pocket wars, and the concept of cleaning out Vietnamese foliage with low-yield atomics. We had Dr. Strangelove with its outright denunciation of the madness of overkill, The Americanization of Emily that boldly stated there is no nobility in combat, only loftiness in cowardice, and, in recent memory, Paths of Glory, which showed the base drives of those who make our wars. Now, here, we have another, somewhat more enigmatic view of the problem. Trevor Howard's (occasionally overplayed) Major Fincham would rather sacrifice his wounded men to the grim reaper than sacrifice the medicine secreted as "escape rations" by his breakout-happy POWs. Sinatra, as the downed Yankee airman, sees this as madness. "Even if one escap
es, it's a victory," Fincham tells him, but Ryan proclaims it lunacy. Break them all out, he maintains, all eight hundred of them.
For in his acceptance of another way to skin the Nazi cat, Sinatra/Ryan says, in effect: "War must be made, under any circumstances, with sanity." Even when he dies, and Fincham's words echo back to his fading spirit, we see the morality of what Ryan believed:
There is no nobility in war. While he does not quite go so far as to suggest that the most ignominious life is better than the best kind of death, still, he does not veer too far from this ethic.
As for point two, one of the more serious and blatant drawbacks of the "star" system asserts itself here, as regards Sinatra. So typed has he become, so much a caricature of himself with the snap brim tilted over one eye, the trench coat slung over the shoulder, the fingers popping, Mr. Ring-a-ding alla way down the pike, that the character of Ryan, boldly assertive in David Westheimer's novel, from which the motion picture has been adapted, never really seems to take hold. At any moment we expect Frankie to wink and pop a pinkie at us. We are constantly intruded upon by the Doppelganger, the Shade of Sinatra Past, and it is a shame: he acts, for the first time in many films, possibly for the first time since Angelo Maggio. He acts, and with elegant clarity of movement, conservation of style; he underplays, he strives for highs and lows, and in one well-turned moment—when he is compelled to shoot the Italian paramour of the train commandant—he captures us completely. It is too bad we must constantly be reminded this "star" is playing the part. To hell with "star" images, let the bankers and backers give us acting; acting is the seldom fire that lights up the CinemaScope screen.