Cinema: Back to the Front

Von Ryan's Express, drawn from David Westheimer's World War II escape novel, is the kind of story that goes before the cameras almost as soon as it comes off the presses, possibly because the book reads like a scenario. Yet it makes a breakthrough of sorts. In the novel, the hero presumably lives happily ever after. In the movie, he dies.

Shot down over Italy in 1943, Colonel Joseph L. Ryan (Frank Sinatra) is sent to an Italian prisoner-of-war camp where he outranks and outrages a stuffy British major (Trevor Howard) and soon earns the prefix "Von" from the British and Americans he pushes around. After a sluggish beginning, Express starts to swing, and Frank swings with it, when the 400 Anglo-American prisoners are caught between retreating Germans and advance units of the U.S. infantry. After a day of freedom, the men are recaptured by Germans and packed into a freight train bound for the fatherland. They manage to subdue their Nazi guards (negligible opposition), don Nazi uniforms (good fit), and bluff or blast their way through Florence, Verona, Milan, and a burning fuel depot into Switzerland. A train pursued by troops and planes across enemy terrain can be counted on to boil over with excitement from time to time, and one battle scene filmed at dizzying altitudes in the Italian Alps brings the action to a peak.

The best crowd-pleasing bits fall to Sinatra. His serio-comic masquerade as a Nazi becomes more than a stunt when, speaking German with eyes, hands, and shrugged shoulders, he fakes a conversation with a Gestapo man who has spied his American watch. Inevitably, the tedeschi leave a voluptuous collaborator (Raffaella Carra) reclining in the caboose. Sinatra spurns her advances, and when she tries to escape, he regretfully mows her down, simultaneously thumbing his nose at his own public image and giving this rolling-stock melodrama at least one swift, strong, indisputable moment of truth.