The Cassandra Crossing
As I get (slightly) older (each day) I'm realising that I have a weakness for many of the films that I remember from my early childhood.
Most people of my generation should at least be able to relate to this in terms of Star Wars (cue debate over merits of original trilogy vs. inferior prequel trilogy, etc, etc). This is due largely to the nostalgia factor: for many of us this was one of the first really big films we'd seen. Consequently the film is held in remarkably high regard. I guess what we remember is the experience of the film, more than the film itself. To that end objectivity is pretty meaningless: Star Wars may not be the greatest film you'll ever see, but for people of a certain age it will always be one of the greatest film experiences we've ever had (and how disturbing is it that we can now comfortably start referring to 'original' Star Wars fans as being of a certain age).
Much of the reason for this is that Star Wars was unlike anything many people had ever seen at the time. It was a new experience for cinemagoers in general, but it was doubly so for very young viewers for whom every trip to the cinema brought something new and exciting.
For similar reasons, I also remember many big films of the seventies from TV screenings. Again, they may not have been the greatest films ever made but many moments from these films stuck with me because I simply hadn't seen many films at that stage in my life.
Back in the days when we only had the three channels, the debut screening of a big movie was an event. Understandably, being too young to fully digest Radio Times, I never really knew whether a film was showing for the first time or the fiftieth. Films, after all, were things that you went to the cinema for, while TV screenings of films (many of which I wouldn't have remembered being at the cinema anyway) occupied an alternative, timeless space in which there was just this endless cycle of entertainment being broadcast (not unlike today, actually).
In fact, my understanding of films on TV was so flaky back then that for some years I even thought that Live And Let Die was a made-for-TV movie. That's another story.
Now, The Cassandra Crossing was one of those big seventies movies that I remember really well from TV. I may have just seen it the once, or I may have seen it half a dozen times, but there's enough moments from it that have stayed with me through the years that when it cropped up on TV a while back I was eager to sit down and reappraise a childhood memory.
Unfortunately it was on really late and I only managed to watch about 40 minutes of it before I fell asleep.
Luckily, it showed up on Film Four a few weeks later and this time I managed to catch the whole thing (well, nearly - ironically I missed about the first 20 minutes on this second attempt).
The plot is relatively straightforward - a man coming down with a serious case of plague smuggles himself away on a trans-European train. As the passengers start getting ill, some sort of shady international health organisation decides to quarantine the train. They choose to do this by diverting it over the Cassandra Crossing, a rickety, abandoned rail crossing so dangerous that people won't even set up house beneath it. When the passengers on the train learn of this plan they decide to take matters into their own hands rather than take the risk of being pebble-dashed.
They really don't make them like this anymore, which is one of the reasons I have a great fondness for seventies films in general.
The cast didn't have to be under 25 and pin-up-beautiful back then (although of course Sophia Loren adds a fair dose of international glamour). The effects technology, though ambitious, simply wasn't advanced enough to allow filmmakers to rely on visuals alone. Consequently little things like, plot, character and performance often take centre stage. For that reason the build up is slow, but by the time the climax comes around you really feel like you've shared a journey with these people, rather than merely watched them go through a series of predefined plot-dictated motions.
There's also a remarkably downbeat ending (which, nevertheless, still manages to make you feel as if the 'heroes' have won the day). While some of the big modern disaster films will have plenty of mostly anonymous people killed off early on, it'd be a brave writer these days who would wait until the very last act to slaughter a trainload of innocent people. (That's not really a spoiler - the multitude of foreboding shots of the creaky, rusting Cassandra Crossing that are dispersed through the last half of the film give you fair warning that no good will come of a train attempting to cross this bridge.)
Many people will already be familiar with the classic seventies disaster movies - The Towering Inferno, Earthquake, The Poseidon Adventure. If you enjoy those films you'll be on safe ground with The Cassandra Crossing. I imagine that this is the sort of film that the modern-day blockbusters often aspire to be, but are ultimately corrupted by studio politics and idiotic studio execs who assume that bigger is better.
The Cassandra Crossing belongs to the pre-blockbuster dynasty, a forgotten era where the dominant force guiding the cameras was to make the best film you could, not merely to make the most money. Fortunately we've thus far been spared a rash of disaster movie remakes (Poseidon notwithstanding). Perhaps in the wake of Armageddon and Titanic, the disaster movie is seen as old news (at least until someone decides it's the next new big thing). If we ever do see a remake of The Cassandra Crossing you can bet it won't be like this (it'll probably be set in the US for one thing) so do yourself a favour and see it, at least before its memory is desecrated on the remake slab.
