The Sleeping Car Murder

There have been a handful of directors, notably Clouzot, Delannoy, Kurosawa and Claude Miller who have taken the 'police procedural' to new heights and transcended the genre. To this select group can be added Costa-Gavras for his astonishingly assured directorial debut 'Compartiment Tuers'.

This technically virtuosic and gloriously inventive piece is impressive enough by any standards but Costa-Gavras has here taken the giant leap from assistant to fully-fledged director with consummate ease.

He has the good fortune of course to have the services of simply superlative talent both in front of and behind the camera and great material with which to work, based as it is on the novel by Sébastian Japrisot who is renowned for 'subverting the rules of the crime genre'.

This film is a heady mix of policier, film noir and mystery thriller with a sprinkling of black humour and succeeds as both homage to and spoof of those genres.

The cast comprises some of France's finest and one has to mention Yves Montand who shows a new maturity here with his greatest roles still to come, not only for this director but also for Claude Sautet.

A first film can be make-or-break and here Costa-Gavras is setting out his stall and declaring "Here I am!" Luckily for us, here he stayed.

This film, the original French title of which is COMPARTIMENT TUEURS, is known in English as THE SLEEPING CAR MURDER. I don't believe it has ever been available with English subtitles on DVD or video. I obtained a poor DVD copy of an off the air tape, which was dubbed into English. Despite the poor quality of my copy, it was well worth viewing. The film is directed and scripted by the famous Costa-Gavras, but is one of his least known films, because of the lack of distribution. It goes at a cracking pace and has a splendid cast. Probably the best job of acting is done by Michel Piccoli as a hopeless, creepy lech who is on the edge of madness and can't make it with women despite his uncontrollable lusts and interior rants of frustration, which we hear as voice-overs. Tthe film is filled with other well known actors. Yves Montand plays a world-weary Paris police inspector, Simone Signoret plays an aging woman who has fallen hopelessly in love with a mysterious young man played by Jean-Louis Trintignant. The scene where Montand interviews Signoret (the two in real life were a well known couple, as most people are aware) is amusing, because they struggle to control their giggles. Catherine Allégret plays a young girl just travelling to Paris for the first time in a sleeping car with five other people, two of whom are Signoret and Piccoli. They are on an overnight train journey from Marseilles (although the story starts at Avignon) to Paris. Upon arrival, a glamorous woman in the compartment is discovered to have been strangled to death. The police set about trying to find the killer and start by attempting to round up all the people who had spent the night in the sleeping car. But then, one by one, before the police can get to them, the people in the sleeping car are brutally killed by the same person, presumably to get rid of witnesses to the strangling of the woman in the sleeping car. However, the story has a lot more surprises than that. The film is based upon a novel by the very clever writer Sébastian Japrisot, who is famous for A VERY LONG ENGAGEMENT (2004) starring the Elf, Audrey Tautou, and THE CHILDREN OF THE MARSHLAND (1999, see my forthcoming review). This was the first feature film directed by Costa-Gavras, who was later to shake the world with his powerful political dramas such as Z, STATE OF SIEGE, MISSING, and MUSIC BOX. He is still with us, aged 81, and directed the film CAPITAL starring Gabriel Byrne and Philippe Duclos (one of my favourite actors) as recently as 2012, when he was 79. One curiosity of the casting is that Claude Berri appears as a porter in the film, though uncredited. It was in this same year that he produced his first short film, LE POULET. He had already been acting for twelve years. This film has many twists and turns and an extraordinarily ingenious plot. I will not spoil things by even hinting at an explanation of it. Costa-Gavras directs with verve and intensity, and he achieves a spectacular success with the complicated filming of a sequence where a speeding car is being chased by a gang of motorcycles. It is no easy thing to keep track of half a dozen speeding vehicles of different sizes streaking across the streets of Paris at night, and make it look convincing. The cinematography by Jean Tournier is a tour de force, and the editing by Christian Gaudin enables the director to achieve his sense of an insoluble mystery hurtling over a cliff into the unknown at ever-increasing speed, with Yves Montand, who is heavy-lidded and has a cold, streaking after it, determined to find out whodunit if it is the last thing he does (I mean, the last thing he does before going to sleep, as he so laid back that one often does not know whether he is thinking or napping). The spider's web of complexity of this film's plot and the explosive speed at which it travels creates what was to be the trademark Costa-Gavras sense of danger and excitement from this, his very first film. If you can find it and manage to see it, you certainly won't regret it. What a way to start his career as a director!

And also the first film directed by Costa Gavras, very brilliant, tense, intelligent, compelling and grabbing for any audiences. Agatha Christie 's novels atmosphere, schemes, seems not being so far from this one. It is not AND THEN THEY WERE NONE either but I repeat, the suspense is there, all long. Sixties atmosphere and score too. Pierre Mondy and Yves Montand are excellent and the dialogues typically French of this period. Costa Gavras will find his way later with political oriented films, not only thriller as this one. He will be famous for this. A true little gem. And so many stars as Michel Piccoli, Simone Signoret, Jean Louis Trintignant, Charles Denner; at least at this time, 1965, they were not all stars, they were just in progress.

Six people are in a train sleeping car. One of them is murdered. Thus begins a fine thriller with some really good suspense. The story's underlying premise is clever and quite unusual for its time.

The main problem here is the dialogue, which makes character identification unnecessarily hard. In the first 13 minutes, nine major characters are introduced, but no names. People refer to each other as "you" and "miss" and "she". Fully 18 minutes elapse before we know the names of all six sleeping car occupants. Even then we have only names, but no way to connect the names with the faces. As the plot moves along, additional characters are introduced, which further muddles a suspect pool that is already unclear. Because of the sloppy script writing, this is one of the most frustrating murder mysteries I have ever watched. Some simple changes in the script's dialogue could have made the characters so much easier to identify.

The film's chilling suspense is reminiscent of Hitchcock. The solution to the whodunit puzzle is quite interesting, and foreshadowed by clues that are effectively subtle. Another plus is the presence of the lovely, and talented, Simone Signoret.

"Compartiment tueurs" is a good thriller. If the characters had been better defined the film could also have been a great whodunit.

I saw Compartiment tueurs many years ago in a movie house in New York City. I walked outside feeling still overwhelmed by how great a movie it is. It is an excellent mystery with outstanding performances by Yves Montand and Simone Signoret, but it is much more. Most mysteries do not work the second time around. What matters too much is discovering who the murderer is, but not here. What counts is not just the suspense and action but something else, a profound moral statement. The film reminds me a lot of Hitchcock's Vertigo, in which the audience knows two-thirds of the way through the film what has been happening. Well, in this film the audience begin to catch on to something else, something more significant than the identity of the killer. We discover something more disturbing, the pettiness of crime, particularly of murder. It is what Hannah Arendt called the "banality of evil."

I like movies that have depth to them. I should, having degrees in several areas. As a philosopher and ethicist I relate strongly to what this film says. There is no greatness in criminality; by the end of the film we feel only a gnawing sense of all that has been lost.