The Cassandra Crossing (1977)

Admirable film.

This is a coming of age storyline that you've seen in one form or another for decades. It takes a truly unique voice to make yet another one worth watching.

A terrific literary drama and character piece that shows how the process of creating art can be seen differently by those doing it and those looking at it from the outside.

A clunky actioner with a handful of cool moments.

Good story idea, but a ridiculous story realised, uniformly incompetent in dialogue and plot. Burt Lancaster, who could make convincing drama out of anything he's given, struggles in boredom with a completely incomprehensible role. If his colonel and Ingrid Thulin's W.H.O. white lab coat did reflect real-life critical faculty at the highest levels, we'd all be doomed. And how does an Army Intelligence colonel manage to reroute a train without getting national railroad officials to help? But, this is high camp, and there is a hefty load of distancing effect because a band of youths are singing the soundtrack while a virus rages among them. Surely this subverts disaster movies well before Airplane! ever did. Sophia Loren and Richard Harris are miscast. Lee Strasberg was given a smudge of a role, and Ava Gardner seemed to be playing diva just for laughs. No one appears to perform with any belief in the script. But, it chugs along with reasonably good flow to keep us wondering. In its favour is director George P. Cosmatos's trademark aerial photography which succeeds in capturing a marvellous sense of setting - a tidy opening sequence and a tidy epilogue adds some finesse. The cinematography is also very good. Jerry Goldsmith's score soars and prompts us about the impending danger even if suspense is small in accompaniement. The Cassandra Crossing is a good example of the "The Box Rule", a useful rule-of-thumb about movie advertisements. If it has a row of little boxes across the bottom, each one showing the face of a different international star and the name of a character, invariably a stock character, then....avoid like the plague.

While often goofy, this can be quite exciting and even engaging. In fact, the very beginning is just the first of several scenes that are cool(and could be awesome, if their execution had been better). This is helmed by George P. Comatose(no, I realize that's not the correct spelling of his last name... but it is my guess as to how he directs, since he messes this and Rambo II up), and some of the action is honestly not half bad. The (unintentional) silliness is increased all the more by the music, which has a hilarious tendency towards being *ridiculously* over the top. This also holds numerous sequences that help prove the rule that... and pay attention, because a lot of film-makers can learn from this... not everything looks good in slow-motion. The acting is reasonable enough; wise men fear this movie's attempts at accents, though. You can't ignore the amount of famous people - most of them their career long dead - cast yet given little if anything to do here. I wonder how many people see O.J.'s performance in a completely new light today. The effects vary. This all adds up to being fairly entertaining, if you can turn your brain off(and tolerate the excessive running time). There is brief sensuality and infrequent moderately strong language in this, as well as a little mild violence and disturbing content. The DVD holds three trailers. I recommend this to fans of simplistic disaster flicks. 6/10

I happened to catch this film today on a cable channel. It was worth watching again. Unlike other disaster films, this film was an original set on a train with a plague ridden passenger. Aboard this Paris bound train, it's changed to a place in Poland which was a concentration camp to quarantine the passengers. What the passengers don't know is that they have to cross "The Cassandra Crossing" which is poorly constructed bridge in Poland that can't handle the train's weight. Even the former residents have left living there because of the bridge's danger. I thought this film has a lot of thrilling sequences even with the seventies music and score by Jerry Goldsmith. The cast is first rate with the late Richard Harris (who should have been knighted), Sophia Loren, Martin Sheen, Ava Gardner, Lee Strasberg, even O.J. Simpson is cast in an unusual role. I haven't watched anything with Simpson since 1994. I thought Lee Strasberg was brilliant as was Burt Lancaster and Ingrid Thulin as well.

THE DISASTER Movie is a sub-genre of the Action/Drama hybrid that seems to go on being popular down through the years. Decade after decade, we find stories of terrible impending occurrences and the number of diverse characters, perfect strangers, who find themselves caught up in the dangerous, deadly happenings; which ironically bring the varied and disparate personalities together and often in great dependence on each other's care and vigilance.AS FAR as ancestry of the film type, we can only guess; but it surely can trace at least a portion of its lineage back to the earliest days of the cinema. Even the movies of the by then well established filmmakers of the early 1920's realized the great potential in story telling that could be realized via the road to filmed disaster.EVEN the great Cecil B. DeMille applied the disaster element in his first version of THE TEN COMMANDMENTS (Famous Players-Lasky/Paramount Pictures, 1923); where he made the story both Biblical & Historical as well as Contemporary by the use of flashback from modern contemporary times to the age of Moses.TRACING the family tree of the disaster movie brings to light such titles as THE HIGH AND THE MIGHTY (????/Warner Brothers, 1954), AIRPORT ( ) and its clones, the "Sensurround" laden EARTHQUAKE (????/Universal,197?) And a minor matinée pot-boiler called ZERO HOUR (Paramount, 1957), which oddly enough gave birth to the low budgeted, big hit sensation, AIRPLANE (Zucker-Abrahams-Zucker/Paramount, 197?).THE DISASTER Movie can even trace its roots to John Ford's STAGECOACH (?????, 1939), which had all the elements; the only difference being that the tragedy isn't caused by either man-made malfunctioning of transport mode or natural causes, but by the impending attack by local hostiles.TODAY'S HONOREE, THE CASSANDRA CROSSING ( ), is one more obvious title to come out of those 1970's "new" and "more relevant" and "more realistic" school of film. The production is spectacularly mounted, with some of the truly most beautiful outdoor scenery to be captured for a non-nature film. One certainly cannot fault the Production Team as being too tight with the purse strings; for they put together a spectacularly talented and well known international cast.READING THE Cast listing one finds such notables at the top of the bill as: Sophia Loren, Richard Harris, Martin Sheehan, Orenthal James Simpson ( "O.J." to you, Schultz), Lionel Stander (off the Blacklist), Anne Turkel, Ingrid Thulin, Mr. Lee Strasberg (master of The Actors' Studio in rare film appearance), Ava Gardner (no Schultz, not the Ava from GREEN ACRES), Burt Lancaster, Lou Castel (where's Abbott?), John Phillip Law, Ray Lovelock, …etc., etc., etc.,………..ANOTHER positive element is the inclusion of Jerry Goldsmith as the Composer for the Original Score for the film. Mr. Goldsmith's composition of both the Overture (theme) and the Incidental Music is on Parr with his other work. The prolific Goldsmith was responsible for a veritable treasure trove of beautifully rendered scores. Perhaps some of the most notable original compositions would (arguably) be: PATTON (20th Century-Fox, 1970), PAPILLION (Corona-General/Solar/Allied Artists, 1973) and RUDY (Tri-Star Pictures, 1993).ATTENTION!! WARNING!! CUIDADO!! LOOKENZEE OUTENZEE!! Could be a SPOILER a comin' up!! OUR STORY……….A passenger train which is carrying a real mixed bag of passengers, which most any self-respecting disaster film would do, is making a crossing of the Alps from Switzerland into northern Italy. A terrorist purposely spreads some deadly strain of virus throughout the train and its passengers, which would normally require a state of Quarantine. The train keeps on traveling and somehow or other comes under the jurisdiction of Lt. Colonel Stephen Mackenzie (Burt L.), U.S. Army, NATO Forces.BECAUSE OF THE Highly Contagious and deadly disease, the Lt. Colonel allows the train to continue on its way to the unsafe bridge works that lie ahead of it. There the train would surely crash; killing both all on board as well as ridding Mackenzie of the problem of dealing with a potential epidemic.OF COURSE, the battle hardened and cold-blooded military man couldn't have known that the presence of some Physicians on board miraculously provided the train crew and passengers with a cure for the infectious malady by using pure oxygen inhalation. (There is another twist, but we'll not tell here!) AS FINE of a production as this picture is, and as interesting as certain of the scenes and sequences are, we cannot give it a full and unconditional endorsement; for we disdain the heavy and underhanded-handed method in which its highly one-sided, "subtle", little message is sprung on its unsuspecting audiences. It is clearly one of an Anti-Military and America Hating. It is crystal clear that this is the crux of the hidden persuaders contained within.WE FIND this sort of loading of the story with a highly charged, one-sided and distorted view of what is the responsibility of authorities in general and the Military of the United States of America to be deplorable, deceitful and deeply harmful to unsuspecting viewers.AT least a can of poison has the written warning, the antidote and the ever present skull & cross bones to give proper warning.AS for our Grade, both Schultz and hid good buddy (me) say * ½ or a D-on its Report Card.POODLE SCHNITZ!!