John Frankenheimer’s “The Train” is one of the more stranger action pictures one could hope to see. It does spotlight the looting of art by the occupying Germans. “Violence exists as a detail in the industrial landscape, where humans are cultured by their machines and the iron horse they ride. The action is male, the art is female… and once again men fight over her, although this time she is pure symbolism, crated in boxcars heading for the museums of the Third Reich.
Russell:The plot is superb. You can have people talk about art and what it means as a physical example of the cultural and spiritual identity of a people, but without a clear example of what it means to be without art, all the talk in the world doesn't do it. The conqueror has always removed booty for his pleasure -- Napoleon did it when he invaded Egypt, and no doubt MacArthur did it when he invaded Japan.
Burt Lancaster personally requested Frankenheimer as the director of his next film. The inspiration for this flick was the book Le front de l’art: défense des collections françaises, 1939-1945 (The Art Front: Defense of the French Collections, 1939-1945), which was written in 1961 by Rose Vallard. Based on her personal experiences as the curator of the Musee du Jeu de Peume, a refined Paris gallery, Vallard narrates how she and the French Resistance protected the valuable paintings throughout the German occupation of France during World War II. The gallery collection included paintings by Renoir, Van Gogh, Manet, Picasso, Degas, Cezanne, and Matisse, but most of these masterpieces were considered as “decadent art” by Hitler and the Nazis.
"Vallard’s book describes how, as the allied forces approached Paris in August of 1944, German officers placed the precious contents of the gallery on a train towards Germany. The Nazis had the intention of selling these paintings to wealthy collectors, and use the money to support the war effort. It is ironic, however, that this train and its valuable cargo was not stopped by risky sabotage actions performed by the French Resistance or by daring military operations on the part of the US Army. Instead, the departure schedule of the train was continuously delayed by the endless Nazi bureaucracy, and it only managed to go a few stations outside of Paris."
The film is about a Nazi officer whose hidden love of art forces him to raid a museum and put the painting on a train headed for Germany. The museum curator begs for the help of Labiche (Lancaster), a railway inspector, and his friends. Initially, they are apprehensive. Labiche and his fellow engineers give a stirring speech questioning the importance of retrieving art when they had just lost a friend that morning. “We won’t waste lives on paintings.” Reluctantly, they decide to give in. The last straw is Labiche seeing his mentor, Boule (Michel Simon), executed for trying to stop the train himself.
"So it was in 1936 that Jung wrote about the god of storm and frenzy which had seized the German people. "A hurricane has broken loose in Germany while we still believe it is fine weather," he wrote in Zurich's Neue Schweizer Rundschau. What struck him about the German phenomenon was that ". . . one man, who is obviously 'possessed,' has infected a whole nation to such an extent that everything is set in motion and has started rolling on its course towards perdition." What Jung saw happening in Germany was the collectivization of the spirit, a regression to the pre-Christian Germany of Europe's "tribal" past. The individualized man who was the product of Christianity was being taken over by a collective demonic spirit embodied in Hitler. "
It is an action film with minimal action. That action centers on the actual occupation of the hero; the protagonist, Labiche, is just a is just a train inspector thrown into this horrific sequence of events. Lancaster is perfect in this part. His building-up confrontation with Colonel Waldheim (Scofield) is worn on his face the entire time and comes to a dramatic head at the very end of the film.
In The Train, Frankenheimer forces the viewer to question the relative worth of art and human lives. On one hand, the paintings not only are priceless, but they also embody nationalistic pride and other cultural values. On the other hand, human lives are equally irreplaceable and their loss is judged by strict moral and social codes. In any case, both French and Germans are willing to kill or be killed for the sake of a fancy piece of cloth.
“In 1918, as Jung studied the meaning of the dreams of his European patients, he recorded his observations of the “beast” that was ready to break out “with devastating consequences” as “the Christian view of the world loses its authority.” He noted that especially in his German patients, he found “peculiar disturbances,” images of violence, cruelty and depression which could not be ascribed to their personal psychology, but appeared to represent something in the collective German psyche. Accordingly, Jung, who as a Swiss-German was part of the German culture, turned his attention to the state of mind then prevailing in the German nation. His conclusion was that the “dechristianization of man’s view of the world” was resulting in an uprush of unconscious forces representing “all the powers of darkness.”
Michael Donnelly:Few war movies are so explicit about showing the civilian casualties that are the fallout of military action. As friends, allies, and innocent bystanders fall around him, Labiche begins to look haunted. The heroic everyman, he can overcome any challenge but isn't immune to the emotional toil of seeing so many die at his orders. For him, stopping the train is never about keeping the art in France's hands; it's about making meaningful all the deaths that came before. At the beginning, Labiche and his time seem to enjoy wrecking havoc on the Nazi's operations. By the end the hero is so hardened by the carnage he's witnessed that he feels no joy at in his victories.
ADDENDUM:
Further work with patients from many European countries as well as America showed Jung that this state of mind was by no means limited to Germany, but was increasingly representative of Western man.
Thus Jung began to correlate the diminishing hold of Christianity on the Western mind and culture with the rise of psychology. There appeared to be a specific relation between the two phenomena. Why was it, he wondered in 1928, that “the discovery of psychology falls entirely within the last decades.” It could only be, he concluded, that “a spiritual need has produced in our time the ‘discovery’ of psychology.” Formerly, people felt no need of psychology as does modern man. “All through the Middle Ages,” he told a New York meeting in 1935, “people’s psychology was entirely different from what it is now.” Psychologically, Christianity was a projection of the God-image in the unconscious, an image that is the ordering symbol of the psyche. But as Western man has become more and more rational, believing himself to be free from “superstition,” the archetypal contents expressed by Christianity have come loose from their moorings. The result is widespread alienation; more precisely, modern man has put himself at the mercy of the psychic “underworld.” As rationalism and scientific understanding have increased, so has manís world become more dehumanized. Technology, which has diminished our contact with nature, has also decreased the emotional energy that the nature connection supplied. Contemporary man, Jung wrote for the Europaische Revue in Berlin, “has lost all the metaphysical certainties of his medieval brother, and set up in their place the ideals of material security, general welfare and humanitarianism.” In Jung’s view, Western man had replaced his spiritual faith in the kingdom of God with a secular belief in the welfare state. In psychological terms, modern man has replaced an integrated personality with an over-reliance on ego-consciousness.
"Another rationalization was that as the conquered, following the treaty of Versailles, in 1919, which signaled the death knell of World War I, Germany suffered the indignity of a looting of its art treasures which it sought to repatriate. This war booty dated back to the sixteenth century including a painting hanging in the Metropolitan Museum of Art and art from Napolean's military campaigns. The evil mission of compiling a list of art stolen from Germany, was outlined in a report ordered by Hitler and directed to Martin Borman and Goebbels, Minister of Propaganda. The resultant Kummel Report filled three volumes. Since it was determined that if a peace treaty was forthcoming official reparations would ensue, they kept this report under a cloak of secrecy. The report included a vast array of art treasures - paintings, sculptures, medieval armor, porcelain, silver, military flags, glassware, medals, and coins. Only due to recently declassified data compiled by British and American officials after the war, from intelligence sources, can the complicity of the Germans in the French art market be exposed. French art dealers were either coerced into participating in these devious deals, or else enthusiastically engaged in these deals with their newfound, and quite affluent clients. So anxious to obtain this art, German curators, in mid-battle, descended upon the Parisian art market. An historical precedent was established whereby government appointed diplomats undertook the mission of purchasing artwork full-time, in this case, for the glory of the Third Reich. "
…Indeed, as The Train begins, Lebiche cannot comprehend the value of art as a national symbol and he does not really care about the paintings. And then, as the story progresses, the confrontation between French and Germans actually boils down to a harrowing duel between Lebiche and von Waldheim. Furthermore, the rather ambiguous ending suggest that just as Lebiche might be fighting to defend a cherished national treasure, he could just be seeking revenge for the death of his friends at the hands of the Nazis.
Picasso. The Rape of the Sabine Women
Russell:And the art? Cezanne, Braque, Matisse, Picasso and all the rest? You never really see it. Once crated, it exists as an ideal, and the real art becomes the landscape. The Train has to be one of the best photographed films ever. The cool semi-tone renderings of de Sica’s Indiscretion of an American Wife come to mind but this is way beyond that. Or the expressionist rapture of Welles’ last action painting, A Touch of Evil… if you think in terms of long tracking shots and uninterrupted sequences. Frankenheimer does it all. And without the easy melodrama of special effects and the pretty face….
…. the finale sees the adversaries facing off beside the stalled train, the art crates littering the cut bank behind the Nazi in a silent irony to the bodies of the hostages behind the patriot. The war, in effect, is over:
Von Waldheim: Here’s your prize, Labiche… some of the greatest paintings in the world… does it excite you, Labiche? A painting means as much to you as a string of pearls on an ape… you won by sheer luck. You are nothing, Labiche… a lump of mere flesh… the paintings are mine… beauty belongs to the man who appreciates it…. (pause) Now, this minute, you couldn’t tell me why you did what you did….
While the face-off is a stock situation in film and usually resolves as a fight, the cliche is swept away by the integrity of the acting.
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