Two strangers, Jerzy and Marta, accidentally end up holding tickets for the same sleeping chamber on an overnight train to the Baltic Sea coast. Also on board is Marta's spurned lover, who will not leave her alone. When the police enter the train in search of a murderer on the lam, rumors fly and everything seems to point toward one of the main characters as the culprit.
Lucyna Winnicka Leon Niemczyk Teresa Szmigielówna Zbigniew Cybulski Helena Dąbrowska Ignacy Machowski Roland Głowacki Aleksander Sewruk Zygmunt Zintel Tadeusz Gwiazdowski Witold Skaruch Michał Gazda Zygmunt Malawski Józef Łodyński Kazimierz Wilamowski Jerzy Zapiór Jerzy Ćwikliński Henryk Dudziński Andrzej Herder Barbara Horawianka Joanna Jóźwiakówna Ludwik Kasendra Janusz Majewski Czesław Piaskowski Klemens Roman Andrzej Ropski Jadwiga Siennicka Henryk Staszewski Mieczysław Waśkowski
Pociag, Train de nuit, Trem Noturno, Nachtzug, Nattåg, Comboio correio, Az éjszakai vonat, To traino tis nyhtas, Nyhterino treno, Yöjuna, Nattexpressen, Der Nachtzug, Baltic Express, Il treno della notte, Загадочный пассажир, 夜车, 야간 열차, Tren de noche, El tren nocturno, Загадковий пасажир
Poland
Germany
Sweden
Finland
Japan
USSR
UK12
USSR
Finland
Germany
Japan
Poland
Sweden
UK
USSR
I won't deny the influence of Hitchcock and the initial fragments of the by-then fresh Nouvelle Vague, yet I won't deny its superiority over Hitchcock either. Strangers on a Train (1951)? This groundbreaking Polish masterpiece conglomerates a vox populi of a community of strangers put together under mysterious circumstances. It is labeled as a thriller but its plot emphasis goes much more beyond. The score is superb and the photography work is top-notch: claustrophobic when necessary and exciting and absorbing when capturing an outside world awaiting for unexplained and tragic events to step foot on natural soil.
99/100
2nd Jerzy Kawalerowicz (after Mother Joan of the Angels)
One of the bleakest films to come out of a country that does a good line in bleak cinema. Taking place from the start of a train journey to its end, it tells of a few small dramas that reverberate around the cramped cabins. They're all rather sad and faintly squalid; a murder committed in the city, a woman on the way to meet a lover and fleeing a desperate romantic attachment, a man fleeing his past. Fleeting connections are formed between the sad and lonely passengers, mayfly-like in the span of a journey, only to be destroyed as soon as the train arrives at its final destination. The film leaves…
I didn't know when I started this that this was by the same director as Mother Joan of the Angels, but after the climax of the film, I suspected it might be. The low angles capturing crosses and people in dramatic moments, the overhead shot of the swarming mob, the austere look of the film--combined with the fact that this was also Polish and filmed in the same era--suggested it might be the same director. His visual style is distinct, with debts to a few obvious sources (Bergman, Hitchcock), and I am excited to find more of his work for that alone.
What Kawalerowicz created here is a capsule setting that allows him to focus on a small cast of…
Night Train adopta un estilo Hitchcockiano, aunque el estilo de dirección de Kawalerowicz es más sombrío que el de Hitchcock y la película se extiende rápidamente entre el thriller/misterio y el drama de manera excelente. Como sugiere el título, la película está ambientada a bordo de un tren, y el director realmente hace un buen uso de este escenario, ya que la claustrofobia del tren se impone constantemente, y también entran en juego otros elementos como la oportunidad de conocer a extraños en un tren y la idea de que muchas personas diferentes estén juntas en un solo lugar.
“everybody wants to be loved. nobody wants to love.”
cinema is when a collection of eccentric individuals are all united by happening to be on the same train together
Another well-regarded film that I admired rather than liked. A train is traveling from Lodz to the Baltic Coast. As it rushes through the night, we meet the assorted passengers and two strangers - a man and a woman - who accidentally share a sleeping compartment. We also learn early on that a murderer is being sought by the police and may be on board. But rather than a standard thriller or mystery, director Jerzy Kawalerowicz instead concentrates on the interactions of the many passengers - all unknown to each other before boarding - when forced together for a night.
It's an examination of the boldness with which people enact their curiosity and projected feelings, fears, desires and biases onto…
Everyone wants to be loved. Nobody wants to love.
Easily one of my favorite train films ever, right up there with von Sternberg's Shanghai Express. Director Kawalerowicz and crew bought two train cars and transported them to their film studio to create the wonderful cinematography of a moving train we saw for the train's interiors.
A bunch of strangers congregate in a train heading for a Baltic summer holiday destination, Hel. Noir crosses with drama as passengers grapple with the idea that one amongst them may be a murderer. The murder mystery angle is not the main focus, however, and Night Train (or as it's known in Polish as just Train) fleets from compartment to compartment, with its main focus…
Shitty subtitles but powerful film. Every character seems to be on the edge and at first the viewer has to go through explosive evening full of rudeness and huffing and puffing before the human dimension starts to reveal itself and the characters become more understandable and their flaws tangible. In the end this film noir-esque work becomes meditation on the fleeting nature of human relationships, the difficulty in judging human character, social paranoia and citizen policing. The film interestingly highlights the kind of society in which everyone is possible suspect and wrongdoer. In this even the viewer doesn't necessarily have the moral high ground. Everyone has their reasons.
