Von Ryan's Express [G]

After his plane is shot down and he’s captured, Colonel Joseph Ryan becomes the commanding officer in an Italian POW camp of British and a few fellow Americans. When the Italians retreat from the war effort, the camp is emptied and the prisoners find themselves on a freight train headed for Germany. With no other means of escape in sight, Colonel Ryan and his team take out their guards and hijack the train in the hope of changing its course from Germany to Switzerland. 

Although a rollicking and action-packed thrill ride, Von Ryan’s Express stands as an enjoyable war movie, but nothing all that special. I don’t know if director Mark Robson was trying to make another Great Escape on a train or what, but there were a few things that made this movie fall just that little bit short of the mark, a bit like the ending really. 

After his plane is shot down and he’s captured, Colonel Joseph Ryan becomes the commanding officer in an Italian POW camp of British and a few fellow Americans. When the Italians retreat from the war effort, the camp is emptied and the prisoners find themselves on a freight train headed for Germany. With no other means of escape in sight, Colonel Ryan and his team take out their guards and hijack the train in the hope of changing its course from Germany to Switzerland. 

The story itself is a very good one. It promises all the thrills and spills of war and prisoners escaping and there was a really good balance of conflict between characters as well as foes, potential romantic interest, and even comedy. I think what kept this movie under the label of good movie rather that great was the fact that there were no characters that you could really root for. The relationships between all the characters were more or less thrown together and I think the relatively wooden performances from quite a few of the cast helped in nailing down the coffin’s lid. 

Frank Sinatra as the film’s protagonist pretty much just walks through the entire thing with no salt or level of character dept at all, which is really quite sad because his story is where the movie could really have had an emotional impact. Applause has to go out to Edward Mulhare whom brought a good level of comedy to the film being the only prisoner who could speak German, thus having to pose as a Lieutenant on more than one occasion. I found his scenes quite enjoyable. 

Starring Trevor Howard, Raffaella Carra, Brad Dexter, Sergio Fantoni, John Leyton, Wolfgang Preiss, James Brolin, John Van Dreelen, Adolfo Celi, Vito Scotti, Richard Bakalyan, Michael Goodliffe, and Michael St. Clair, Von Ryan’s Express is an enjoyable enough movie filled with action, suspense, death, drama, explosions, and comedy. At the end of the day, I just couldn’t find anything special about it and it was just a relatively entertaining war movie, namely for the action sequences.