The Train

“It carried their hopes, their nation's honour!”

Paul Labiche (Burt Lancaster) runs the rail yard in Paris in August 1944, a station master who keeps the schedules and, quietly, belongs to a shrinking band of resistance fighters. Colonel von Waldheim (Paul Scofield) wants every great French painting loaded onto a train for Germany before the Allies arrive. Frankenheimer shoots the yards in hard detail, and Labiche is handed the schedule that can either move the paintings out or keep them in France.