Every so often the idea is raised that, rather than separate national film industries in each of the European countries, there should be a single pan-European cinema industry which could make large-scale films to compete with those coming out of Hollywood. The idea suffers from the same flaw which has doomed all political attempts to build a United States of Europe- the cultural and linguistic differences between European nations, far greater than those which exist between any two American States- but that does not prevent occasional attempts to create the Great European Blockbuster. "The Cassandra Crossing", a British-Italian-German co-production which tried to transfer to a European setting that quintessential Hollywood genre of the seventies, the disaster movie, was one of those attempts.
The plot concerns a terrorist who, in an attempt to escape following a failed attempt to blow up the headquarters of the World Health Organisation in Geneva (here, presumably for legal reasons, renamed the International Health Organisation), boards a trans-European express train bound for Stockholm. Unfortunately, the man has become infected with a particularly virulent strain of pneumonic plague, and it is feared that he will infect his fellow-passengers. In an attempt to avoid a Europe-wide outbreak of the disease, the authorities arrange for the train to be diverted to a former Nazi concentration camp in Poland where the passengers can be held in isolation. The only way in which the camp can be reached, however, is along a disused railway line which passes over a dangerously unstable bridge known as the Cassandra Crossing.
The film has a European setting, and makes use of European stars, such as Richard Harris and Sophia Loren, but is still heavily indebted to Hollywood, borrowing not only big American names such as Burt Lancaster and Ava Gardner but also lesser lights such as Ann Turkel or O.J. Simpson. No doubt it was felt that the film needed such names to compete in the American market, and probably in the European one as well. Despite this debt, however, the film's politics are virulently anti-American. As he had done a few years earlier in "Seven Days in May" (and as he was to do a few years later in "The Osterman Weekend") Lancaster plays a villainous American army officer, Colonel Mackenzie. (To stress the link with the earlier film, Mackenzie's subordinate is called Captain Scott, the surname of the character Lancaster played in that film). Mackenzie, who has the responsibility for dealing with the emergency, has little regard for the lives of the passengers; his main concern is to cover up the fact that the Americans have been using the IHO headquarters to conduct illegal germ warfare experiments. The European characters, however, apart from the terrorists, are generally sympathetic or heroic. The message was clearly that the presence of US forces constituted a threat to European security; in fact, by deterring Soviet aggression, NATO and the American presence did much to preserve the peace during the seventies and throughout the Cold War.
Although the director George Pan Cosmatos manages to create some tension during the early scenes when the passengers on the train start to fall sick, the film suffers from two main defects (quite apart from its biased political stance) which prevent it from being an effective thriller. The first is that as the film progresses, the plot becomes more and more melodramatic and improbable. The sick passengers start to recover, cured by the remarkably simple method of pumping oxygen into the carriages, but Mackenzie still continues to order the train towards the dangerous bridge, and a group of passengers fight to take control from his security guards. There are a number of plot-holes which are not resolved; it is not, for example, explained why the Communist authorities in Poland are happy to go along with Mackenzie's scheme, which seems to have been designed to prevent embarrassment to the American government.
The film's second main defect is a lack of realistic characters. Burt Lancaster, in the latter part of his career, generally had a good eye for a role, and starred in some of the best films of the sixties, seventies and eighties, from "Elmer Gantry" to "Field of Dreams". His judgement did, however, desert him on occasions, and he ended up in some embarrassing turkeys. "The Hallelujah Trail" was one such occasion, and "The Cassandra Crossing" was another. In "Seven Days in May" he was able to invest General Scott with a depth that saved him from being a one-dimensional villain and the film from becoming a mere melodrama. Lancaster, normally a fine actor, was unable to perform a similar service for "The Cassandra Crossing", and Mackenzie is never more than a cardboard villain.
The passengers on the train are all similarly one-dimensional stereotypes, largely selected for maximum emotional impact. There is Jonathan Chamberlain, a brilliant doctor, and his twice-divorced ex-wife whom he meets purely by chance, giving them the opportunity to engage in some "battle of the sexes" banter that would be more at home in a Hepburn/Tracy type screwball comedy than in a supposedly serious drama. There is the wife of a millionaire industrialist and her toyboy lover, a cute little girl, a nun, a pair of hippies and a suspicious-looking clergyman (who turns out to be a detective on the trail of a drug smuggler). Most pathetic of all, there is a former concentration camp inmate whose family were murdered in the very camp for which the train is bound.
The disaster films of the seventies can look very dated today, but many of the American examples, such as "Earthquake" or "Jaws", have survived much better than this one. The future of film-making in Europe did not lie with inferior copies of Hollywood blockbusters like "The Cassandra Crossing", a disaster movie in both senses of the term. 3/10
