The excellent and action packed motion picture starring Burt Lancaster as the resistance hero makes for a more exciting story than the actual event and that is understandable. The movie is well done with Lancaster pitted against the arch-Nazi villain, superbly portrayed by famed British Shakespearian actor, Paul Scofield. There are well done train sequences on the SNCF railway in France with actual historical equipment. The brilliant changing of the station signs and the surrepticious rerouting of the train back to Paris by the French Resistance is very clever, if fictional! The train wreck sequence is well done, as are all the train portrayals. Of course, Lancaster's character's obligatory romantic involvement with the widowed hotel owner played by French actress, Jeanne Moreau, is part of the plot. His character finally shoots the Nazi colonel, after viewing the executed hostages, and he leaves the unloaded crates of artwork where they lay. The unspoken implication was whether the art works were really worth the many deaths that resulted from the efforts to retrieve them!
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