Night Train – DVD Review

6th May 2013

Night Train is a Polish drama that was directed by Jerzy Kawalerowicz and originally released in September 1959 under the title Pociąg. It stars Lucy Winnicka, Leon Niemczyk, Teresa Szmigielowna, Helena Dabrowska and Zbigniew Cybulski. Ostensibly a thriller, the film tells the story of a man on the run – who may or may not be a murderer – boarding a crowded train and being obliged to share a sleeping compartment with an unhappy young woman.

Towards the end of the film, one of the characters says “Nobody wants to love. Everybody wants to be loved”, a statement which neatly encapsulates Kawalerowicz’s central theme. Although the current DVD release from Second Run pushes the film as a Hitchcockian thriller I’d say that it has much more in common with Ingmar Bergman’s work, being far more concerned with the relationships between people – or, to be more accurate – the spaces between people than it is the plot. Indeed, I think it’s fair to say that there is no plot to speak of; rather, there is a situation into which various characters, or pairs of characters, are introduced.

The central pair is Jerzy the fugitive and Marta his sleeping carriage companion. Both are fleeing but it is not clear whether they are in flight to or from something or someone. Nevertheless, each recognises the other as a lost soul and they make tentative steps towards attempting to understand one another. A number of other pairings within the film overlap with one another, a case in point being Marta and her ex-boyfriend Staszek. Similarly, Jerzy finds himself the subject of attention from an unhappily married woman (known in the script simply as Lawyer’s Wife). In some respects the film is structured like Max Ophüls’ masterly La Ronde (1950) although one might equally say that it is the obverse of that film in the sense that it concerns a series of overlapping unsuccessful relationships.

There is a useful extra on this DVD release in the form of an insightful, if brief, documentary about the Polish new wave of film-makers. My guess is that most film buffs will know the work of Andrzej Wajda but fewer will know Jerzy Kawalerowicz; that’s certainly true in my own case, I’m ashamed to say. However, the documentary makes clear that Kawalerowicz is regarded, by Poles at any rate, as the father of their new wave and goes on to explain that his interest in character as opposed to narrative set him apart from his predecessors as did his immense technical skill.

Whatever his place in Polish film history may be, Kawalerowicz’s film is incredibly accomplished visually. While some of the footage was shot on board a real moving train, some was shot in a real train carriage on a set with rear projection providing the moving background. The quality of the technical work in this regard is exemplary and, dare one say it, far in advance of what Hollywood could manage at that time. Indeed, it’s often the case that the rear projection work even in Hitchcock’s films is terrible. And as if to indicate how far ahead of its time Night Train was there is a sequence towards the end of the film, set to music, which reminded me of no-one as much as Jim Jarmusch; given Jarmusch’s fondness for European cinema that may not be as strange as it sounds.

The cast contains a few actors who may be more familiar than you would initially think. Leon Niemczyk was in Roman Polanki’s breakthrough feature Knife in the Water (1962) and also had a small part in David Lean’s Inland Empire (2006). Zbigniew Cybulski, who plays Staszek, was terrific in Wajda’s Ashes and Diamonds (1958) and was a hugely influential in Polish screen acting. Tragically, and ironically considering some of the shots he’s in in Night Train, he was killed at just 39 when he fell beneath the wheels of a train he was attempting to board.

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