Tag Archives: richard harris

The Cassandra Crossing (1976)

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The Cassandra Crossing which is one of those star-studded disaster movies that was so popular in the 1970s. It is about how an eco-terrorist accidentally contaminates himself with a deadly virus and then boards a train. Once the government learns what’s happened they seal up the train and make sure no one can get off. They reroute it to Poland where they will be quarantined until a cure is found. To get there they have to cross a disused and likely hazardous bridge called the Cassandra Crossing.

Richard Harris plays a neurologist who just happens to be a passenger on the train and becomes the defacto hero. Burt Lancaster is the government, military guy back at the base barking all the orders to keep everybody aboard. The cast also includes Sophia Loren as the neurologist’s wife, Ava Gardner as the wife of an arms dealer, Martin Sheen as her plaything, OJ Simpson as the world’s worst priest, and Lee Strasberg as a Jew who is none too keen to be returning to Poland (apparently the train is going to quarantine them at an old concentration camp.

That’s a good cast and the basics of the story are interesting, but like so many of these star-studded disaster movies it spends too much time giving each actor a good scene or two, and not enough making me care. Or at least be thrilled by the suspense.

It is confusing, too, I’m not 100 percent sure they were headed towards the concentration camp. Wikipedia says so, and Strasberg’s character has a nervous breakdown, but I didn’t hear any dialogue expressly stating that was their destination. I’m not really sure why they have to go to Poland anyway. The train was originally a Geneva to Stockholm exchange. It seems like they could just park it somewhere relatively isolated, board it up, and wait until the doctors figure things out. A lot of the plot is like that – confusing.

The actors, for the most part, seem to be having fun, and I always like watching lots of cool actors in a film together. But I wish they’d tightened things up a bit and concentrated on making this thing as tense as possible. Instead, it is a bit of a bloated mess.

Things do get a little exciting toward the end when our heroes do battle with the military goons in order to stop the train before it pummels off the bridge and it’s got one of those terrifically bleak endings. But it takes far too long to get there to make this a recommendation.

Westerns in March: Major Dundee (1965)

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Made between his more traditional western Ride the High Country (1962) and his revisionist one The Wild Bunch (1969) Sam Peckinpah’s Major Dundee works as a kind of bridge between the two styles.

It stars Charlton Heston as Major Dundee a Union officer who is relieved of his command and transferred to run a prisoner-of-war camp in New Mexico territory. When an Apache war chief slaughters a family of ranchers and steals their children Dundee gathers a rag-tag group of soldiers, Confederate prisoners, thieves, drunks, and a small group of black soldiers to hunt him down.

They say Peckinpah was drunk for most of the shooting causing all sorts of difficulties with the studio and with Heston (rumors have it Heston once threatened the director with a saber). His original cut was over 4 hours long, the studio took control of the film after that and knocked it down to just over two hours. Some of that has since been restored but the bulk of the “director’s cut” is now lost to history.

What’s left is a bit of a mess, but there is enough there to make it worth watching.

The film is less interested in what normally would be the main story – that of these men going after the Apache – and more interested in the rivalry between Dundee and Captain Tyreen (Richard Harris) an Englishman turned Confederate officer. The two have a history together and Dundee can’t understand why Tyreen would betray his country in this war, and Tyreen can’t fathom how Dundee would raise up arms against people he knows, his friends and family members.

Tyreen regularly tells Dundee that once they’ve captured or killed the Apache he’s gonna turn his sights onto him. Dundee says he’ll be ready for it and the two square off throughout the film while maintaining an uneasy alliance.

There is a version of this film in which Dundee is a megalomaniac in the vein of Captain Ahab, hell-bent on his mission all other considerations be damned. From what I’ve read that is exactly what Peckinpah was reaching for. But Heston is too likable an actor to make that come across. His version of Major Dundee comes across as a decent officer, trying to make the best of a difficult command.

In the end, the film never quite satisfies. Oh, it is watchable enough. Peckinpah is too good a filmmaker not to make things unwatchable, even when he is half in the bag. Heston does some of his best work here, too. But it never coheres into something truly good. One wonders what that 4 hours version would have been like. If Peckinpah’s original film was an epic masterpiece or an incoherent mess.

We’ll probably never know. What we’re left with feels like an interesting transitional film for the director. One where he’s leaving behind the influences of classic western auteurs like John Ford and Howard Hawks and creating something new and modern. But he’s not quite there yet.