A Snowy Story With Arms Trafficking
When I was a kid one of my favorite movies was Where Eagles Dare, starring Richard Burton and Clint Eastwood. It deals with a secret British mission to infiltrate a German fortress built on a high mount in the Bavarian Alps. The Germans have captured a British general who has knowledge of the upcoming Normandy invasion. Burton and Eastwood are to rescue him, but they run into many obstacles, with Eastwood's U.S. Army Ranger character left in the dark by Burton as the story gets increasingly complex.
The film was based on a novel by Alistair MacLean, who also wrote Breakheart Pass, a movie set mostly on board a train in the American West in the late nineteenth century. This film, from 1975, is also very complicated, with the protagonist (Charles Bronson) not who he seems to be, guarding his secrets just as Burton's character does in Where Eagles Dare. On one level the film is a murder mystery. Someone is killing people on a train on its way to a military fort where, according to the state's governor (Richard Crenna), a terrible outbreak of disease has occurred. He travels with his (unacknowledged to everyone else lover), a young woman (Jill Ireland), the daughter of the fort's commandant. Also on the train are two cars filled with U.S. soldiers commanded by their Major (Ed Lauter). These are meant to replace the sick and dying at the fort. A U.S. Marshal (Ben Johnson) has as his prisoner a man wanted for arson and murder, Bronson's character.
As the film unfolds, and more and more people die, Bronson turns out to be an omni-competent man, knowledgeable in medicine, capable of driving and stoking a train engine, and, for some reason revealed late in the movie, adept at investigating strange happenings. He also knows Morse Code and is quite the hand to hand fighter, even on top of a snow-covered moving train car.
The film, like many suspense dramas of the period, is replete with sons of bitches, notably Ben Johnson's Marshal and Crenna's surly Governor, whose motives for everything he does become increasingly narrowed in the direction of unethical behavior.
The man who at the beginning seems like the bad guy, Bronson, is actually the good guy, while the authority figures who seem on the side of right at the beginning, are, with one notable exception, assholes.
It's an Agatha Christie murder story with a train setting, but much more violent than any Christie novel. One of the film's highlights is the Western mountain setting. Shot in Idaho, with real snow and an actual choo-choo train, Breakheart Pass was directed by Tom Gries, who made a great Western in 1967 starring Charlton Heston called Will Penny. Breakheart Pass isn't up to that film's level of quality, but it's entertaining, with Bronson giving one of his good typical stone-faced performances and his real life wife, Jill Ireland, looking pretty in every shot.
Vic Neptune
When I was a kid one of my favorite movies was Where Eagles Dare, starring Richard Burton and Clint Eastwood. It deals with a secret British mission to infiltrate a German fortress built on a high mount in the Bavarian Alps. The Germans have captured a British general who has knowledge of the upcoming Normandy invasion. Burton and Eastwood are to rescue him, but they run into many obstacles, with Eastwood's U.S. Army Ranger character left in the dark by Burton as the story gets increasingly complex.
The film was based on a novel by Alistair MacLean, who also wrote Breakheart Pass, a movie set mostly on board a train in the American West in the late nineteenth century. This film, from 1975, is also very complicated, with the protagonist (Charles Bronson) not who he seems to be, guarding his secrets just as Burton's character does in Where Eagles Dare. On one level the film is a murder mystery. Someone is killing people on a train on its way to a military fort where, according to the state's governor (Richard Crenna), a terrible outbreak of disease has occurred. He travels with his (unacknowledged to everyone else lover), a young woman (Jill Ireland), the daughter of the fort's commandant. Also on the train are two cars filled with U.S. soldiers commanded by their Major (Ed Lauter). These are meant to replace the sick and dying at the fort. A U.S. Marshal (Ben Johnson) has as his prisoner a man wanted for arson and murder, Bronson's character.
As the film unfolds, and more and more people die, Bronson turns out to be an omni-competent man, knowledgeable in medicine, capable of driving and stoking a train engine, and, for some reason revealed late in the movie, adept at investigating strange happenings. He also knows Morse Code and is quite the hand to hand fighter, even on top of a snow-covered moving train car.
The film, like many suspense dramas of the period, is replete with sons of bitches, notably Ben Johnson's Marshal and Crenna's surly Governor, whose motives for everything he does become increasingly narrowed in the direction of unethical behavior.
The man who at the beginning seems like the bad guy, Bronson, is actually the good guy, while the authority figures who seem on the side of right at the beginning, are, with one notable exception, assholes.
It's an Agatha Christie murder story with a train setting, but much more violent than any Christie novel. One of the film's highlights is the Western mountain setting. Shot in Idaho, with real snow and an actual choo-choo train, Breakheart Pass was directed by Tom Gries, who made a great Western in 1967 starring Charlton Heston called Will Penny. Breakheart Pass isn't up to that film's level of quality, but it's entertaining, with Bronson giving one of his good typical stone-faced performances and his real life wife, Jill Ireland, looking pretty in every shot.
Vic Neptune
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