The Cassandra Crossing (1977) Movie Review, Cast & Crew, Film Summary

The film with the greatest line in cinema history – Richard Harris enquring with an utterly straight face, “What sweaty pervert?” – The Cassandra Crossing is also a stand-out from the pack of cheesy all-star disaster movies of the ’70s in being a Euro-heavy production, and for mantaining a real dramatic tension, and presenting a solid sub-text, as US militarism and terrorists-for-peace clash, resulting in the passengers on a luxury train being infected by a bug that just so happens to behave in the same fashion as the Andromeda Strain. This causes Burt Lancaster to get mean and send them all heading for certain death on a rickety Polish bridge, so passengers have to fight The Man to survive. The film consistently references Nazism both visually and in the script, as Lancaster’s plastic-suited goons take over the train at Nuremburg, and the film effectively evokes European Cold War anxiety of the past never really leaving anyone alone. If much of the film is silly – how about OJ Simpson as an undercover Interpol agent disguised as a priest hunting down Martin Sheen’s drug-dealing mountain climber who’s Ava Gardner’s toyboy? – it still entertains.