The Train

The Train (1964) is a wartime thriller directed by John Frankenheimer — watch it online on iFILM. August 1944: German Colonel Von Waldheim, played with cold obsession by Paul Scofield, has commandeered a locomotive to haul France's greatest paintings — Picasso, Renoir, Matisse — out of Paris and into Germany before the Allies arrive.

Burt Lancaster is Labiche, a pragmatic railway inspector who joins the Resistance operation not out of love for art but out of something harder to name. The plan is intricate: reroute the train, fake the station signs, keep the cargo intact while London has ordered nothing be destroyed. Each move costs lives. Jeanne Moreau appears as a hotel owner caught between two sides with no good options.

Frankenheimer shot with real locomotives and staged actual derailments — the crashes are enormous and completely practical. The film presses a question it refuses to answer cleanly: does a Picasso justify a death? Stream The Train (1964) online on iFILM.