But that historical value cannot be scoffed at. Clement, who had previously made documentary shorts, brings a documentary style to this salute to the role French railroad workers (“les cheminots”) had in thwarting the Nazi occupiers and contributing to their overthrow during World War II. With a cast of mostly non-professionals, some of whom recreate their resistance activities for the movie, La Bataille du Rail earns its earnestness.
At first, La Bataille du Rail feels as if it's going to be a very scattered experience. Although an opening crawl mentions the Nazi's division of France into occupied and “free” zones, the movie never comes out and says which zone it's taking place in (occupied, apparently) or what year the action begins, while it also opens in rather random fashion, with a montage of train workers secretly passing papers, hiding men and secretly sabotaging hardware. All this intrigue is to make the French train network, with which the Nazis are transporting raw materials (like French-mined coal) and troops, less efficient and reliable, and to make it work for the French, not against them.
This extended montage and a narrated sequence introducing a command center where trains are ordered into action and their progress tracked really just set the scene, though. After the resistance learns that the Allies have landed in Normandy, a central mission emerges: to stop a convoy of trains carrying German soldiers from getting to the western front. Bridges are blown up offscreen to limit the options for the train's route and then other measures are taken. Tracks sections are removed, another train is derailed to block the way and, in one of the more brazen acts, workers sabotage the 30-train crane that's brought in to put the derailed cars back on the tracks, so that the Nazis must then call in a 50-ton crane to move the first crane.
Sometimes the events in the movie are hard to follow. When, at one point, a group of resistance fighters take over a train that you think is the troop convoy, it turns out it's a different set of trains. Then, suddenly, we're told the troop convoy is being escorted by an armored train (think train-sized tank). Later, after the big action scene in which tracks are blown up at a predetermined spot (and the resistance-friendly French engineer has opened the throttle before leaping off the locomotive), causing train after train carrying Nazi tanks to go hurtling into a valley, it improbably seems that several cars still make it through, calling for one last attack on the convoy.
The moviemaking is similarly uneven. Most noticeably, the big battle scene in La Bataille du Rail, between resistance fighters and Nazis on the armored train, gives a poor sense of the spatial relationship between the two sides. The cuts between the Nazis inside the train randomly firing and the resistance fighters in the woods randomly reacting often match poorly and hurt the drama. The unadorned docudrama benefits from more stylistic interludes at other times, though. When the frustrated Nazis line up six cheminots against a wall and shoot them one-by-one to send a message to saboteurs, the camera focuses on the last man's fixation on a spider climbing the wall in front of him and the smokestack he eyes to his right. It's a rare, character-specific moment in a movie that has no place for character development. The build-up to the bombing and derailing of the convoy train, which follows the engineer's actions as he speeds up the locomotive and readies to jump from it, also generates real tension.
Ultimately, La Bataille du Rail is a close cousin to a wartime propaganda film. It's a post-war morale booster that let the French feel good about the victory over Nazism. As with a propaganda film, it sometimes must be taken with a grain of salt. In La Bataille du Rail, the notion that any Frenchman might not resist the Nazis seems barely possible, but we know that happened, too. It took many years for such quickly-buried truths to resurface. Clement's first feature takes on added value for those familiar with his 1952 drama Forbidden Games, a very different WWII movie in which the emphasis is entirely on character and emotion. While Forbidden Games unleashes universal themes for a worldwide audience, La Bataille du Rail (just out on a no-frills disc from Facets) has a specific passion that isn't as lasting, but was no doubt just what Clement desired.
For more information about La Bataille du Rail, visit Facets Multi-media.
by Paul Sherman
