Trivia for
The Train (1964) More at IMDbPro »

• In the opening sequence, the parade of major artists' names stenciled on packing crates - GAUGUIN, RENOIR, VAN GOGH, MANET, PICASSO, DEGAS, MIRO, CEZANNE, MATISSE, BRAQUE, SEURAT, UTRILLO - is immediately followed by the director's credit for John Frankenheimer.
  
  
• John Frankenheimer said of this film, "I wanted all the realism possible. There are no tricks in this film. When trains crash together, they are real trains. There is no substitute for that kind of reality."
  
  
• The engine that crashes into a derailed engine was moving at nearly 60 mph. The crash was staged in the town of Acquigny, with extensive safety precautions and special insurance. Only one take was possible, and seven cameras were used.
  
  

• The engine that we see from track level as it's derailed was moving faster than intended. Three of the five cameras filming the derailment were smashed.
  
  
• The engines and tanks required for some scenes made so much noise that "action" and "cut" were signaled by codes on the engines' whistles.
  
  
• The air raid on the yards was filmed at Gargenville yard, outside Paris. More than 50 people under Lee Zavitz needed six weeks to plant and wire all the charges, which were blown up in less than a minute.
  
  
• The filmmakers hired a train to carry their equipment from one location to another, and this is the train we see as the art train in the film.
  
  
• The wartime curator of the Musée du Jeu de Paume, represented in the movie by Mlle. Villard, was in real life Rose Valland. The movie was inspired by her 1961 non-fiction book "Le front de l'art: défense des collections françaises, 1939-1945" (The Art Front: Defence of the French Collections, 1939-1945).
  
  
• In real life the museum's paintings were indeed loaded into a train for shipment to Germany, but fortunately, the elaborate deception seen in the movie was not really required. The train was merely routed onto a ring railway and circled around and around Paris until the Allies arrived.
  
  
• Director Arthur Penn oversaw the development of the film and directed the first day of shooting. The next day was a holiday. Lancaster, dissatisfied with Penn's conception of the picture, had him fired and replaced by John Frankenheimer. Penn envisioned a more intimate film that would muse on the role art played in the French character, and why they would risk their lives to save the country's great art from the Nazis. He did not intend to give much focus to the mechanics of the train operation itself. Frankenheimer said that in the original script Penn wanted to shoot, the train did not leave the station until page 90. The production was shut down briefly while a the script was rewritten. Lancaster told screenwriter Walter Bernstein the day Penn was fired, "Frankenheimer is a bit of a whore, but he'll do what I want." What Lancaster wanted was more emphasis on action in order to ensure that the film was a hit after the failure of "The Leopard" by appealing to a broader audience.
  
  
• In the final confrontation between Lancaster's Labiche character and the Nazi colonel played by Paul Scofield, the shooting conditions were so cold that Scofield reportedly had to talk while inhaling so clouds of warm breath wouldn't appear on film. His voice was looped in later.
  
  
• The budget for the film doubled under Frankenheimer, due to an emphasis on action and the filming of train wrecks, eventually reaching $6.7 million. United Artists felt compelled to step in an assert its completion rights, demanding that principal photography on the film be finished in seven weeks.
  
  
• Lancaster took a day off during shooting to play golf when the shooting was about half completed. On the links, he stepped in a hole and re-aggravated an old knee injury. In order to compensate for the injury, Frankenheimer had Lancaster's character shot in the leg, thus enabling him to limp through the rest of the shooting.
  
  
• Burt Lancaster performs all of his own stunts in this movie. Albert Rémy also gets into the act by performing the stunt of uncoupling the engine from the art train on a real moving train.
  
  
• The sequence in which Burt Lancaster evades an air attack on his locomotive by driving at full speed into a tunnel was based on an attack on the Great Western Railway during the war. A passenger train was pursued by a German aircraft along the main line into Wales. Reaching speeds estimated at 90mph (well above the wartime restrictions in place) the train successfully escaped into the tunnel under the River Severn in Gloucestershire and stopped beneath the river until the driver judged that the danger had passed. The train was struck several times during the chase but there were no serious injuries.
  
  

• SPOILER: As the art train is coming to its final stop where von Waldheim will be killed, we see a closeup of his face. Prominently placed in the background is a sign on the train, never shown earlier in the movie, that warns of "danger de mort": lethal danger. (It actually refers to the live wires that run above some tracks.)
  
  

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