The Train

I love Burt Lancaster and I love French art, but even more, I love old trains.  As a kid, I remember a train exhibit where you could climb up into the locomotive, pretend you’re moving the levers and blow the horn.  I remember being disappointed that we couldn’t watch the wheels move, in their distinctive chugging motion.  My excitement over first riding a train to Chicago probably embarrassed my friends in college.  A couple years ago, I wandered around the Chattanooga Choo Choo and tried to not look more fascinated than the little boy calling every train Thomas; not easy.  I look at trains much like I do dinosaur fossils, with wonder, awe and looking at all the pieces trying to imagine just how they moved.  John Frankenheimer’s The Train is like pure catnip to me.  The visual focus is on trains and they provide a lot of drama and action. Burt Lancaster is the starring hero who needs to save priceless French paintings from Nazi Colonel von Waldheim (Paul Scofield) who is trying to transport them to Germany…of course on a train.

Let me re-organize my thoughts for those of you who couldn’t what mode of transportation was used here.  The events of the film are based on a true and historic accounts.  The setting is Paris in August of 1944. Germany has successfully invaded and decides to take the national treasures of France, their paintings.  As the opening credits roll, we see the paintings go into crates and labeled by artist names, Picasso, Van Gogh, Degas and Cezanne to name just a few.  For any art lover, it’s like watching each artist being arrested and locked away.

Looking for help, the museum curator, Miss Villard (Suzanne Flon), seeks out what is left of the French resistance.  What started with 18 is down to 3 men, Labiche (Lancaster) being their leader.  She begs them to somehow stop the train from entering Germany and most importantly, keep the paintings safe.  Easier said than done, considering how Labiche would rather just blow it up and save men, rather than paintings.

The French people go to great lengths to save the paintings and keep the train on French territory.  One of my favorite moments was when the train changes direction and every station ahead has to change their signs to correspond with what the Nazi on board in the locomotive believes the next city should be.  It shows how so many people, all around Paris are helping to preserve their rightful national treasures, and how much they mean to them.

There is a stark realism to the dangers presented throughout the film.  The Nazis execute men for the slightest defiance, and everyone working to stop or slow the train does so knowing their punishment for getting caught.  Dangers of working with big clunky trains are a focus too.  The big train crash scene was done in one shot and used real trains.  It’s a spectacular blow and you just know that guy in the caboose didn’t make it out.  Something about a beautiful black and white film in the 1960s always seems more real and gritty to me.

At the Oscars, The Train received one nomination, for best screenplay.  To me, it feels like this film should be more decorated than that.  It’s just as good a film as Best Picture nominations that year like Darling or Ship of Fools.  But where The Train really shines is in the visual effects department, which only had two nominations that year.  It feel like it got gypped.

Maybe The Train isn’t for everyone.  It has a good amount of classic suspenseful action, but it’s not all flash and explosions like action films today.  The hero is a bit dark and reluctant, with no cheesy catchphrases.  There is a lot of focus on the train, rather than bulging muscles and blood splatter.  And it’s not like the Nazis are stealing diamonds, pirate treasure or the ark of the covenant, it’s just French artwork.  Maybe it’s too realistic for some, but to me, that’s what makes it great.

“Beauty belongs to the man who can appreciate it.”

Schindler’s List

Nearly ten years ago, my first trip to Europe included a visit to Dachau, a once functioning concentration camp, now a Holocaust memorial.  At that age, I had only read about the Holocaust in Eli Wiesel’s Night, The Diary of Anne Frank and our watered-down explanations in history books.  Walking into a place where you know some of the darkest hours of mankind have taken place is horribly indescribable.  Before exploring the grounds, I remember a large exhibit of photos of the camp during operation, many very graphic.  I tried not to show it, but there were moments where my stomach felt heavy, my head light and my legs were nothing but splintering toothpicks.  As I explored under a blue sky and healthy green trees in the distance, all I could see where those shades of gray photos.  The grounds were clear, incinerators clean of ash and memorials were inserted, but I could see what those places had once held.  I was standing where countless innocent people had been murdered and disposed of with no remorse.  Few experiences in my life have ever been so somber and left me with so many nightmares.  Schindler’s List is as close as I dare to get to reliving that visit to Dachau.

It’s amazing how Steven Spieldberg has the ability to finely tune into our emotions.  From the red-blooded excitement in Raiders of the Lost Ark to the wonder, magic and childhood fantasy of E.T.  And then there is the bleak sorrow and heavy burden of Schindler’s List, one of the few movies on this blog I will refuse to watch alone.  I put it off for two days, knowing the depressive state I would be in the day after.  It is upon me now, shoulders tense, brain fuzzy and eyes drooping over the mix of lack of sleep and nightmares.  I’m begging myself to drag these words out of me, put this film behind me and try not to dwell upon one of the most vile moments in humanity.

Ralph Fiennes plays Amon Goeth, one of the most shocking representations of a human being I’ve seen on film.  He’s an SS officer who lives in a mansion overlooking the work camp.  There he lives with his young Jewish maid, Helen (Embeth Davidtz), who rightly fears him.  It is disgusting how he enjoys killing.  In one scene, we see Amon shirtless, shooting any Jew still enough, like target practice, on his balcony.  Helen, who’s naked in the bed behind him is appalled, “Oh God, not again.”  When he’s had his fill of shooting, he strolls over to the toilet and takes a piss with the door wide open.  He has no descentcy in any sense.  In another scene, we’re shown how he will line men up and just start shooting every other man.

Personally, I would not be able to justify this film being in color.  In my visit to Dachau, I had never seen Schinder’s List and yet, I too was seeing a black and white world.  There are a few instances of color in the bulk of the film: the flame of a candle lit for the Sabath and a little girl wearing a red coat.  We see her when Oskar first witnesses Nazi’s ruthlessly murdering people in the ghetto.  This is happening all around the girl, yet she seems to stroll through innocently.  I’ve heard numerous ideas on the red girl’s symbolism and have read that she is based on a true story.  What I felt was that her fate was the shift in Oskar’s casually letting Jews work for him, to making sure to save as many as possible.

The thing I have to remember, is that while Schindler’s List holds nothing back when portraying the ruthless horrors of the holocaust, it is a story of hope and how one man gave and risked everything to save over a thousand lives.  Liam Neeson portrays Oskar Schindler, who in the film is has just as much intelligence as integrity.  He is a German businessman, a member of the Nazi party and a good man.  The end of the film, we are shown the surviving Schindlerjuden visiting Oskar’s grave and given statistics on how the people he saved have populated in comparison to Holocaust survivors in Poland.  The figures are astounding.

While I do not enjoy watching Schindler’s List, just as I didn’t enjoy visiting Dachau,  I feel that it is a good experience.  This is one of those films that every good human being should see.  The Holocaust cannot just be swept away and the least Spielberg could do to honor the memory of over six million victims is to make a movie about their story.  The least you can do is watch it.

“There will be generations because of what you did.”

Cabaret

In 1930’s Berlin, the Kit-Kat Cabaret runs like a miniature Moulin Rouge with seedy characters and suggestive performances.  Sally (Liza Minnelli) is one of the club’s most popular entertainers and has dreams of moving up into films.  That is, if sex and booze don’t get her first.  When she meets the new tenant in her building, Brian (Michael York), a poor young man studying and teaching English, she tries to seduce him.  Just for fun really, since Sally is more of a gold-digger; but Brian is such a British prude that he’s hesitant, for a short while.  Later, when Sally meets the rich and handsome Maximilian (Helmut Griem), she also seduces him while being in a relationship with Brian.  Things get hairy between the three and the rise of the Nazi party only complicates it further.

There’s also Brian’s friend Fritz (Fritz Wepper), an amateur gigolo with the goal of marry an ugly rich woman.  He meets Brian’s beautiful and innocent pupil, Natalia (Marisa Berenson) and accidentally falls in love.  When the subject of marriage comes up, so does religion.  With the Nazi’s on the rise, Fritz has successfully hidden and legally changed the fact that he is Jewish, but Natalia will only marry a Jewish man.  Fritz has to make the decision to save his love or his own skin.

In portraying Sally, Liza Minnelli won the Academy Award for best actress.  Sally is wonderfully loud and crass, yet kind and seems like the kind of person who would be fun for a while, but not easy to get along with.  Her looks is a little mixed up in a good way with a young face full of needless makeup and daring eyelashes.  She has enough female sexuality radiating from her that her short hair doesn’t make her seem masculine, just confident.  The best part is that her voice is as strong as her look and she brings some memorable lines and fantastic musical numbers to life.

Of all these characters, their trials and motivations, my personal favorite was the simple The Master of Ceremonies or Emcee (Joel Grey).  He is regularly the star of many numbers at the Kit-Kat, and they often seem to serve as narration for the rest of the story.  He’s wonderfully odd, even creepy and at times can be camouflaged among the ladies on stage.  Between his distinctive voice, the care taken to his variety of facial expressions and choreography, I was pleased to see that Grey won the Oscar for best supporting actor.  Though his part was small, the impact of this character was huge and set the tone of the club and the film.

Cabaret was another musical that I found enjoyable, simply because the music was kept in believable places where such song and dance would occur, like on the stage of the Kit-Kat.  However, because the film is so different from the original Broadway production, it may not go over well for fans of the stage.  But if you’re looking for a colorful story of love, sex and the rise of the Nazi party, Cabaret is perfect.

“My God! It’s enough to drive a girl into a convent! Do they have Jewish nuns?”

Decision Before Dawn

Just six years after WWII, Decision Before Dawn brings a somewhat sympathetic look at Nazi Germany.  Director Anatole Litvak, who’s work we’ve seen earlier in The Snake Pit, seems more than capable of a war film after directing several war documentaries in the forties.  He filmed in Germany, using the real rubble and leftover guns in the backgrounds.

The setting and our main character, Happy (Oskar Werner) feel real.  It’s mostly the dialogue and dopey self-important American army jargon in the beginning that bog it down.  For the first twenty minutes it feels like everyone is just running around trying to kiss Lt. Rennick’s ass.  It makes little German boy with the uber masculine nickname Happy look like he’s got more balls.

The basic plot is that the Americans hardly have any information on the Germans.  Just maps and hearsay of where they’ve been.  When Lt. Rennick (Richard Basehart) and a private lacking a sense of direction stumble upon a couple Germans separated from their troop, they are taken as prisoners and trained to infiltrate the German army from the inside.

The two Germans are nicknamed Tiger (Hans Christian Blech) and Happy, due to once being a tiger trainer in a circus and just being optimistic.  Their mission is to parachute in, infiltrate the army, and meet up in five days with information.

The film follows Happy, who’s very young, respectable and honest.  Along the way, he runs into a few familiar faces, who offer to help him.  Happy cannot accept, a moral tug starts within him as he realizes that he’s duping his own people and doesn’t want his friends responsible for helping a traitor.  This moral dilemma grows and isolates him throughout the film.

A constant obstacle for Happy are checkpoints for papers at very city’s boarder.  It’s a bureaucratic way of adding tension, where we watch Happy dispose of old papers and pull new ones out of hiding.  With all these efficient points of checking who he is, he’s sure to get caught sooner or later.

In the end, this film is alright.  I enjoyed the sympathetic look at a young German, the moral dilemmas he faces and the realistic look at war devastated Germany.  But everything else just sat there, boring and unsatisfying, like a limp and spongy piece of celery.  Plus, that little voice over monologue that sandwiches in the very beginning and ending that says something about a soldier living only as long as they’re remembered is a little too corny and feels like Uncle Sam propaganda.

“Do you know what you’re getting into?”