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.

Directorial debut of Costas Gavras. A good crime/thriller/noir, better than i expected. This is very well directed, Gavras showed his talent and brilliance from the beginning of his career. Occasionally, it's not that easy to follow but in the end, it makes sense, something not very common for old movies of this genre (Older thriller movies are great and right now i prefer tham than 20's Cinema, but many of them were too unrealistic and unconvincing).

This could have been even better but it lost its steam during the final 20-25 minutes. Still, everything is at least interesting here, from the soundtrack to the acting. Nice cinematography, great music, stylish but substantial too, this is a success.

A very enjoyable and entertaining movie.

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!

I saw this movie only once or twice -- on cable in the early 1980s, I think -- and it has remained one of my all-time favorites. It is filmed in black and white, and is a French police thriller seemingly populated with good-looking and sexy men, which is always an asset for me. I also love Simone Signoret and she is marvelous in this, as always. I think her daughter is in it, too, but I could be wrong. I cannot really review it because it is more or less a dim memory, but I remember being totally captivated by it. I have always looked out for it, but have not been able to either rent or buy it. I only remember excellent films, and I guarantee that any film buff would find this highly watchable and enjoyable.

This twisted cop mystery follows the efforts of the overworked Paris police to solve first, a murder in a couchette car, the dead body discovered only after all the other passengers left, and then the strange necking of many of the others before the cops can get to talk to them. There is great acting here from Signoret, Montand and others, and very amusing supporting parts (the seasoned crook and talker Bob will have you cracking up) but the film doesn't really hang together tight as a police mystery. I agree with an earlier reviewer that it spells trouble for you as a viewer that the passengers, whom we glimpse in half-darkness on the train, remain nameless for too long, and when they are identified by the police, the names are not steadily linked to faces.

It's confusing too that some of the characters suddenly muse into flashback kicking off from lines spoken to them on the train. This deepens them as characters but doesn't make the story concise. And at the police station, things are suddenly tossed in by phone calls in a way that looks haphazard. The root cause, I think, is that the film followed the book too closely, while Costa-Gavras knows how to create arresting, vivid scenes, he hasn't learnt at this point how to reimagine a storyline from writing so that it works on the screen, and so the movie seems a bit unfocused. When the final cause of the murders starts to crop up, it looks for too long like a joke element brought in for atmosphere.

It's not a bad movie at all; the photography is great, the final car chase is a winner (how often do you see a car chase in 1960s Paris?) and the acting is very good. Don't expect a murder story, though, with the tightness and relentless, upheld suspense of "Strangers On A Train" or even some episodes of "Columbo" or "Kojak".