Last night’s movie was the The Train, maybe my favorite Burt Lancaster film ever because it has two of the most awesome subjects you could ever put in a movie, Burt Lancaster and steam locomotives. The film is based on the true World War Two story of the Nazis stealing paintings from the museums of Paris.

That’s about as far as the “based on” part of the movie goes. The rest of it is completely made up. Lancaster plays the role of a fighter in the French resistance who gets the job of trying to stop the Nazis from running off with a trainload of paintings before the Allies can liberate Paris. I’m pretty sure they told him to just show up every day and be Burt Lancaster, because that’s what he did. Even though he’s playing a French guy, he makes absolutely no attempt whatsoever to sound French, yet he still turns in a rock-solid performance.

I’d forgotten what a physical actor Lancaster was, too. In one scene he descends a ladder by locking his feet outside the uprights and sliding down, then runs to meet a moving steam engine, stops dead in his tracks and doubles back to match speed with it, finally jumping aboard by hooking a handrail and hoisting himself up. As an action hero, he could’ve given just about anybody I can think of a run for their money.

It took me forever to remember where I’d seen Paul Scofield, who played the megalomaniacal Nazi colonel: He was the French king Charles VI in Kenneth Brannagh’s film version of Henry V, quite a different part. In The Train he mostly gets to line up resistance fighters against a wall to have them shot, and yell a lot.

There’s some other good performances and some really exceptionally good cinematography, but really, when you’ve got steam engines, multiple daylight bombing raids, steam engines crashing spectacularly into other steam engines, and oh did I mention steam engines – what more do you need to say? Maybe I’ll get into that in another, more long-winded drivel, but for now it’s enough to say Burt Lancaster fights Nazis with steam engines. There. That’s all you really need to know.

I think this was the first time I’d seen The Train since the days when I used to watch it in reruns on the late-late show. My Darling B picked it out from the action movies at Four Star Video after she enjoyed Monuments Men so much that she went looking for movies about Nazis stealing start.