The Train (1994)

Is great art worth the loss of human life? That's the question posed (if never answered) by The Train, one of director John Frankenheimer's best nail-biters of the '60s, a gritty, realistic war flick in which Burt Lancaster and a host of terrific French character actors try to keep an obsessed Nazi colonel (Paul Scofield) from shipping a bunch of plundered masterpieces to Germany. The good news is The Train's first video appearance in wide-screen on this laserdisc. The bad news is the running second-audio-track commentary by Frankenheimer; it's interesting, but it's also interrupted by so many long stretches of silence that waiting for the guy to open his yap eventually becomes more suspenseful than watching the movie itself.

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