The Train is a war thriller that almost completely abandons espionage to focus on work. It is a film about the physics of resistance. It is not a battle of shouted ideologies, but a war of train schedules, steam pressure, and metal against metal. It is an industrial symphony in black and white, a monument to fatigue, sweat, and the unbearable weight of responsibility.

It is August 1944. The Allies are marching on Paris. It is the end of the German occupation. But Colonel Franz von Waldheim (Paul Scofield) is no ordinary soldier; he is an aesthete, an intellectual who truly believes in the eternal value of art, even as he steals it. He has one last task: to load France's treasure—the “degenerate” canvases of Picasso, Renoir, Miró, Degas—onto a special train and send it to Germany. Facing him is not an army, but a Resistance stationmaster, Labiche (Burt Lancaster). And here the film poses its central question, one that many war films avoid: what is more valuable? A Renoir masterpiece or the life of a railway worker? The question is not rhetorical. Labiche, at first, is brutally pragmatic: he will not risk his men for “paintings.”

Frankenheimer's genius, and Lancaster's perfect performance, lies in transforming this philosophical conflict into an engineering problem. Lancaster, with his background as a circus acrobat, does not “play” a worker; he is a worker. His physicality is the driving force of the film. We see him sweat, climb, maneuver levers, calculate risks with the precision of a professional. The Train is perhaps the greatest film ever made about sabotage as a form of skilled labor. It is not a question of blowing up the train—the art would be destroyed—but of stopping it. Of delaying it. Of playing a logistical chess game against German efficiency, using only obsolete locomotives, faulty switches, and a deep knowledge of the territory as pieces. The camera (by Jean Tournier and Walter Wottitz) does not film faces, it films pistons, coal, grease, cast iron. Black and white is not a stylistic choice, it is an industrial necessity that makes the smoke denser and the metal heavier.

The film is a lesson in suspense built not on ‘if’ but on ‘how’. The sequence of the Allied bombing of the marshalling yard is a masterpiece of controlled chaos: Frankenheimer uses real explosions and real derailments, creating a sense of tangible danger that no modern digital effect can replicate. But the real heart of the film is the clash between two obsessions. On the one hand, there is Von Waldheim's intellectual obsession. Paul Scofield (fresh from his triumph in A Man for All Seasons on the stage) gives him a fanatical coldness; he is a man who respects the canvas, but is prepared to shoot hostages without batting an eyelid to protect it. His craving for “beauty” is pathological, dehumanized. He believes he is the only one who can “appreciate” that art, and therefore the only one worthy of owning it.

On the other hand, there is Labiche's pragmatic obsession. The protagonist changes his mind about the value of art not because he suddenly falls in love with Picasso, but because the killing of his old friend, Papa Boule (Michel Simon), transforms the train into a symbol. Saving those paintings ceases to be an artistic mission and becomes an act of professional pride and patriotic revenge. The train must not pass. It's a personal matter. His goal is to defeat Von Waldheim on his own battlefield: logistics. The brilliant sequence in which the Resistance, with an elaborate game of exchanges and road signs, makes the train go round in circles, leading the Germans to believe they are headed for Germany while they are still in France, is an essay in pure mise-en-scène, a thriller where the weapon is knowledge of railway bureaucracy.

Taking over from Arthur Penn (who was fired after a few days, apparently because he was too interested in philosophy and not enough in action), Frankenheimer achieves a perfect balance. All of Penn's philosophy is still there, but it is told through action. The film accelerates to a finale that is pure existential tragedy. Labiche, after sacrificing everything—his men, his network, his very humanity—finally stops the train alone, in the open countryside, in a final act of desperate physical effort. When Von Waldheim, defeated, reaches him, the Germans have already shot the last hostages, whose bodies lie on the ground next to the wooden crates marked “Gauguin” and “Matisse.” .

The colonel, still impeccable, utters the phrase that defines the film: “Beauty belongs to those who appreciate it.” Von Waldheim looks at the paintings; Labiche, covered in mud and blood, looks at the bodies of his friends. The film's initial question (“Is art or life more valuable?”) returns with unprecedented violence. Labiche does not answer with words. He raises his machine gun. The final act is not a philosophical solution, it is an execution. The Train does not give us an easy answer. It leaves us in that final silence, contemplating the ruins of civilization—the paintings in the crates and the men in the mud—and forces us to ask ourselves which of the two truly represents “Paradise” and which “Hell.”