Usually considered one of the last black and white photographed action films, The Train is an exciting story with all of the action sequences staged with real trains and hardware. Amazingly, Burt Lancaster at 51 years old is still doing his own stunts.
Frankenheimer took over the direction of the film from Arthur Penn who Lancaster always something of a "director killer" had fired. Frankenheimer and Lancaster had worked together before, so Frankenheimer knew what he was getting into. Apparently the film was made with a lot of input from Lancaster who didn't have a problem throwing his power around on this production.
The Train was originally going to be a story about uneducated Frenchmen attempting to stop the Nazis from stealing the national art treasures of France. Why would men who probably had never stepped in a museum even care about art? Well we will never see that version of this film. Frankenheimer and Lancaster reconfigured the script and turned it into an action epic and the action is pretty amazing. Real trains crash into each other, a train yard is bombed, just incredible stuff.
Lancaster and Frankenheimer put together an amazing cast of French actors, people who had been associated with filmmakers like Francois Truffaut and Jean Renoir, Michel Simon, Suzanne Flon Albert Rémy and Jeanne Moreau. This is an impressive action film.
The credited screenplay is by Franklin Coen, Frank Davis and Walter Bernstein. The runs 133 minutes.
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