The current issue of the French cinema magazine Studio has a picture of Romy Schneider on the cover and the lead article marks the 25th anniversary of her death calling her somewhat erroneously (she was born in Vienna in 1938) France's favourite German. This film alone is sufficient to see why though she did, of course, make many fine films in France and won the very first Best Actress Cesar back in 1975. The Schneider Trophy was awarded between 1912 and 1931 to the European country and pilot of the fastest seaplane over a nominated distance but a Schneider Trophy for the finest actress over a distance of years and named after the luminescent Romy would not be a bad idea at all. When two mature people - both married but one partner has been missing for two years in Hitler's Germany - meet and fall in love on a train it's not a million miles away from two similar people who met on a train STATION (Milford Junction) in Noel Coward's Brief Encounter and any movie addict is going to make the connection but though all four share similar sensitivities and get across the reluctant inevitability of falling in love Celia Johnson and Trevor Howard never got to consummate their love least of all in the station buffet so when Romy Schneider and Jean-Louis Trintignant actually 'do it' in a crowded freight car whilst their travelling companions are sleeping (with the exception of the whore who catches Schneider's eye and winks) we realize that this is Brief Encounter in spades.

Pierre Graniere-Deferre successfully blends actual black and white newsreel footage with the colour in which he shot Le Train which adds to the authenticity. The storyline has Julien Maroyeur (Jean-Louis Trintignant)fleeing from the Nazis in 1940 with pregnant wife Anna (Anne Wiazemsky, who played Marie in Au Hasard, Balthazar) and their daughter. At the station they are separated, wife and child in first class, husband in a freight car where one of the other 'passengers' is Anna Kupfer (Romy Schneider) although we learn her name only much later. There's a wonderful irony at work here inasmuch as the people in the freight car are actually travelling to Freedom and Away from the Nazis whilst in most cases at that period the freight cars were taking people to extermination camps. There's a wonderful eclectic mix in the car and all the actors who are virtually unknown outside France acquit themselves well. Trintignant has always been a cerebral rather than passionate actor; he doesn't do overt intensity and it's fascinating to watch him fall in love against all the odds and with a pregnant wife on the same train - at least until the first-class carriages are uncoupled en route. There is, of course, a twist, and it takes the form of Schneider telling Trintignant that she is not only German but also Jewish so that when they arrive at the comparative safety of La Rochelle where Trintignant is almost certain to find employment he passes Schneider off as his wife before going to see his real wife at the hospital where she has given birth to a son. This leaves Schneider to do the noble thing and disappear but three years later the lovers meet again for yet another scene that tells us that this is a Brief Encounter for Adults. Graniere-Deferre made some excellent post Nouvelle Vague movies that owe nothing to that hiccup in French Cinema; Le Chat, La Veuve Coudrec, Etoile du Nord and this one, perhaps the finest of them all.

And also the most known French film about the 1940 French exodus, trying to escape from the Nazi invasion. You had EN MAI FAIS CE QU'IL TE PLAIT, back in 2015, also a very good movie, with the same settings. The other strength of this movie, besides the gripping story, is that the director Granier Deferre was only 13 years old at this time and actually lived this tragic period. So, he was the best placed to provide many of accurate details, that would probably not have been shown in another feature. For instance, those women who took advantage of the train stop, in the middle of the country side, to take a pee, in a field. Then a nazi plane arrives and bombards the area. Three seconds later after the smoke has left, we see the two cadavers of the poor women. Or the scene of a man, also taking a pee, standing between wagons, during a train stop ( of course;;;) Some folks have said that you have some lengths in the film, I agree, but in this kind of feature, lengths are sometimes unavoidable. If you had filled this film with plenty of action sequences, would that had been credible? Hell no. A memorable ending that would have made, even a Waffen SS trooper weep. Believe me.

Unusual but not terribly compelling WWII drama almost wholly set aboard a train (transporting French people fleeing from the oncoming Nazi invaders). The film's core is the budding romance between fellow passengers Jean-Louis Trintignant (whose pregnant wife and young daughter are staying in a different compartment and eventually get 'lost' along the way) and Romy Schneider, a German-Jew war widow.

Despite a busy narrative - Trintignant stepping down at every station to ask for the possible whereabouts of his family, Schneider being picked on by a group of loutish passengers in view of her aristocratic airs (meanwhile, an ageing prostitute is all-too-willing to render her services free of charge in such hard times!) and for whom the usually meek Trintignant stands up, a rather underdeveloped subplot involving young single mother Anne Wiazemsky (then still married to Jean-Luc Godard),etc. - the tone of the film is too glum and the treatment too conventional to generate much audience involvement; that said, the interspersing of black-and-white newsreels of similar events from the era was an inspired touch and the scene in which the train comes under aerial attack from the Nazis, leaving numerous victims, is nicely handled (even if the moment when a couple are mown down while relieving themselves in an open field comes off as unintentionally funny!). Besides, the film has other virtues in the pleasant countryside photography of Walter Wottitz (an expert in WWII-based films, among them John Frankenheimer's THE TRAIN [1964] - which was actually filmed in France!) and a lush score from Philippe Sarde.

An interesting moment in the film occurs when Trintignat scoffs at Schneider's recounting of how the Nazis intended to exterminate the Jewish population, which gives credence to the notion that the world only became aware of the full extent of the Holocaust after the war was over. When the train arrives at its destination, Trintignant is re-united with his family (including a new-born son) - but not before having passed off Schneider as his wife to the Gestapo officials! At the end, however, when she's captured as a member of the Resistance they're somehow able to link her back to him and the couple are brought together for questioning...