Critics reviews

Daring set-piece subterfuges done from within the belly of the muscular genre beast.

Frankenheimer's picture was, remarkably, an assignment he took over after the original director Arthur Penn was let go due to differences with star and producer, Lancaster. It neither feels like a movie Frankenheimer took over nor a work for hire – it's so intricately executed, so demanding an exercise, and at such a scale, that even with all the preparation and time in the world, an almost military precision would be needed to deliver.

A ripping system of motion, at once streamlined spectacle and thorny moral quandary—"Beauty belongs to the man who can appreciate it," so goes the pivotal barb in a showdown strewn with corpses and paintings. Inglourious Basterds has an echo or two, considerations extend to Éloge de l'amour and The Rape of Europa.

Using almost all real locations—and blowing up many real trains and trucks, too—Frankenheimer makes a kick-ass genre film seem like history writ large, even if that history involves Burt Lancaster playing a Frenchman. Much like The Great Escape, another rousing fact-based/fact-fudging WWII thriller released the year before, it has a "print the legend" quality that's an entirely forgivable trade-off for what really happened.

Both [The Monuments Men and The Train] are heavily fictionalized adaptations about the Nazi plunder of European art treasures as the Second World War approached its close. While George Clooney's film never finds a tone or a compelling storyline and is given over to speeches about the beauty and wonder of what's being hauled away by the Third Reich, Frankenheimer's moves with locomotive speed, rarely pausing throughout a lengthy running time.