The Cassandra Crossing ** (1976, Sophia Loren, Richard Harris, Ava Gardner, Burt Lancaster, Martin Sheen) – Classic Movie Review 7644

‘A Plague Infested Train Speeds Across Europe To Certain Death At Cassandra Crossing.’ Sounds fun, doesn’t it? Somehow producers Lee Grade and Carlo Ponti persuaded a large number of first-rate actors to jump aboard a European transcontinental train threatened by a terrorist carrying a deadly virus. Of course, nobody will let them off the runaway train, or there wouldn’t be a movie.

Director George Pan Cosmatos’s 1976 Europudding disaster movie The Cassandra Crossing boasts a remarkable all-star cast of Sophia Loren, Richard Harris, Ava Gardner, Burt Lancaster, Martin Sheen, Ingrid Thulin, Lee Strasberg, John Phillip Law, Lionel Stander, Ann Turkel, Alida Valli, O J Simpson, Raymond Lovecock and Lou Castel, but it is nobody’s finest hour.

However, preposterous though it is, it is undeniably entertaining, with some spectacularly feeble model trains mixing in with the real locomotive. Cosmatos keeps it slick and taut, as though he believes every word of it – well he should, he had a hand in the story and the screenplay – and Lancaster makes a grand villain as Colonel Stephen Mackenzie. Loren and Gardner are not well cast or well used, though.

The screenplay is by Tom Mankiewicz, Robert Katz, George Pan Cosmatos and David Rabe, and the story is by Robert Katz and George Pan Cosmatos.

In Greek legend Cassandra was the disregarded soothsayer of doom.

© Derek Winnert 2018 Classic Movie Review 7644

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