Lococommotion

The Train. The setting is occupied Paris in August 1944. With the Allied liberation at hand, an ascetic Nazi colonel (Paul Scofield) orders his troops into the Jeu de Paume Museum to crate up Van Goghs, Utrillos, Manets, Cezannes, Picassos--altogether some 1,200 impressionist and postimpressionist canvases, destined for a rail trip to Berlin. "Beauty belongs to the man who can appreciate it," says Scofield. Given secret orders to stop the train, a French railroad inspector and

Resistance leader (Burt Lancaster) at first refuses, insisting: "I won't waste lives on paintings."

Thus this action melodrama, based on an actual incident, pretends to concern itself with a moral problem: whether to save the masterworks or spare the men. It must have seemed a dull question to Director John Frankenheimer, who simply shunts morality onnto a siding and concentrates on the conflict between a fanatic villain and an athletic hero, playing tug of war with real trains. The results are exhilarating, but only in a muscular way.

As a hero, Lancaster slides down embankments, scales walls and leaps on and off cannonballing locomotives, spurning all stunt-man fakery. But not for a moment does he seem to be a French patriot named Labiche, and Train slows to a crawl when he abruptly turns culture-conscious, exhorting his comrades in rah-team dialogue to risk their necks for art: "It's our national heritage--the glory of France!" To make Lancaster's accent less obtrusive, the voices of Michel Simon and other French conspirators are poorly dubbed into working-class Americanese. Scofield, a gaunt attention-getter in accented English, lends his conventional role some force. Jeanne Moreau, as the hardheaded innkeeper who helps Lancaster to relax between trains, has little to do and does it deftly.

When outdoor commotion is uppermost, which means most of the time, Director Frankenheimer barrels along on a track that really wails. The art train steams toward, then away from, the German border, cunningly diverted by a Resistance plot that disguises whole villages along the route. It squeaks through a spectacular 50-second bombing raid in which a Nazi armored train is pulverized--a scene achieved with 140 charges of dynamite, nine cameras, several dozen expendable engines and boxcars purchased from French National Railroads, and considerable ingenuity on the part of Special Effects Ace Lee Zavitz (who arranged the burning of Atlanta in 1939's Gone With the Wind). Another stunning pile-up is followed by regularly scheduled derailments, all studied with a fond eye for the mechanics of sabotage. At last, face to face beside a clutter of wooden crates and human bodies, the two foes meet in what is clearly intended as a moment of supreme dramatic irony. But The Train never achieves irony. It is too busy brandishing its iron.

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