The Cassandra Crossing

Director: George Cosmatos

Big budgets, big casts, little subtlety, little intelligence. One wonders for how long the American movie companies will continue to exploit the familiar and popular category of film we now call the disaster movie. Not for much longer, I hope, if The Cassandra Crossing is any indication of its development, for this is a true disaster movie, in both senses of the word.

It begins well enough — the opening sequence is an expert display of filming and editing — but gradually resemblances in pattern and form between this and the other movies of its ilk fall into place. One difference here is that the cast is located in neither a ship, a building, a plane, nor for that matter in Los Angleles — but, instead, inside a train.

Two men, in a thwarted attempt to blow up the U.S. sector of the International Health Organisation in Geneva, are pursued by guards into a laboratory containing dangerous quantities of viral pneumonia. Both become infected, one is captured and dies but the other manages to escape out of the country. His means of transport out should not be difficult to guess.

From this point on, as much as the train carries the passengers, the formula carries the film. The formula of disaster movies is well known to us now. There is never one major character but several, each of whom lives, physically or mentally, in a separate theatre of existence until some unexpected catastrophe or other confromts each unlike identity with the other. The characters, by being diverse representations of human nature, evoke dramatic interest from conflict which develops between differing personalities, all of whom are battling for space in the same imbroglio. So that the screen at once becomes populated with good types, bad types, eccentric types etc. So far however, all disaster movies have relied not so much upon the importance of the characters and their interrelationship but upon the actual spectacle or disaster itself and, more significantly, the anticipation of it. The characters become subjective to this and consequently incite the emotions of the audience to pity, fear (a dose of catharsis perhaps), horror, disgust or just poain boredom. This formula, although successful for a while, is now well established and as a result of this familiarity and foreknowledge one is entertained a lot less each time.

Unfortunately for The Cassandra Crossing the weight falls more heavily upon the characters since initially the disaster is present in non-visual terms.

Due to the nature of disaster movies, characters seldom rise above the level of stereotype and so lack any real depth. Witness Richard Harrises Dr. Jonathan Chamberlain make a valiant attempt to contradict this but realising that like the others he must endure the indignities of a poor screenplay. There is a conversation between him and his twice divorced wife, played by Sophia Loren, in which they discuss their relationship in terms of a game, he closes their rapport by saying: "We've played so many games that we dont know what is real anymore". This is standard fare throughout. Ava Gardner looks as though she is doing Earthquake again but actually turns out to be pleasantly mad. Ingrid Thulin, alas, is wasted in a role that offers her next to nothing. Like everyone, she represents a type. One trait of the disaster movie is that the actors are always subordinated into these easily recognisable stereotypes; this enables the audience easier access towards understanding the characters' motives and actions. If one character occupies the screen for only a short time in relation to the total length of the film then the justification for the stereotype method lies in the quick delineation of the character. Actions and movement, while being predictable, are nevertheless characteristic because they are true to the type being played. Burt Lancaster for example, as Colonel MacKenzie, is grim the moment he enters, is grim throughout the film, is grim when the film finishes. He plays a type whose actions cannot be questioned because his actions and dialogue are characteristic of a grim person. And so it goes, for all the actors, for all the film.

The tedium becomes the message. The film plods steps of inevitability. And as usual some die, some survive Nasty men in white suits and gasmasks, an attire suggestive of non-humans, fight it out with the heroes. (An interesting visual trick; since we measure degrees of pain primarily through the observation of a person's facial expression, the concealing by gasmasks of the nasty men's faces acts as a kind of desensitiser for the audience when the white suits and gasmasks are shot and in pain.) The violence here is merely another means of, another excuse for filling in the time until the film's conclusion.

One element of the film did deserve further probing: what of the consequences of the leak of the pneumonic plague, developed secretly by the U.S. for biological warfare? The film askes the question and then ignores it.

In short, this film is nothing but product, an exercise in hack film-making designed solely to cash in on a tried and true routine. One quite capable however, if the proliferation of this type of film increases, of exhausting itself and driving the major studios into bankruptcy in much the same manner the spate of musicals after The Sound of Music did.

— David Beresford