Il treno crociato

Shot in the darkest years of the Second World War, this wartime film exists at the intersection of historical immediacy and cinematic artifice. It represents a rare example of evacuation drama produced not in hindsight, but from within the conflict itself. Unlike many of its Anglo-American contemporaries, it was made while the outcome of the war remained uncertain and the Fascist regime still formally intact-though clearly faltering. That immediacy leaves its mark on every aspect of the production: from the spareness of its technical execution to the solemnity of its tone. What emerges is not a reconstruction of war but a form of narrative ritual, built on the impulse to preserve and elevate suffering rather than to question or expose it.

The film opens with a surprisingly intense and chaotic battle sequence, depicting an Italian assault on a fortified Soviet position along the Eastern Front. It's a brief but striking moment, filled with abrupt handheld camera movements, explosions rendered through minimal effects, and a spatial disorientation that heightens the tension rather than clarifies the action. This direct engagement with combat is unusual for Italian productions of the time, which often avoided showing the war too explicitly or framed it through distant allegory. Here, the violence is immediate, and the consequences are clear: the soldiers wounded in this attack become the central presence for the remainder of the film.

Once aboard the hospital train that gives structure to the rest of the narrative, the cinematographic choices shift markedly. The palette is subdued, the lighting naturalistic, and the compositions favor medium close-ups and stillness. The train becomes both a refuge and a site of quiet moral accounting. There is little dynamism in the traditional sense-no crosscutting between multiple narrative strands, no overt manipulation of tempo. The pacing is deliberate, almost liturgical, reinforcing a sense of resignation and inevitability.

Performances remain controlled, bordering on ritualistic. The wounded are portrayed with stoicism rather than anguish, their pain not denied but sublimated. Dialogue is sparse, with emotional weight carried through gesture and rhythm rather than overt dramatization. The acting tradition drawn upon is closer to theatrical discipline than cinematic spontaneity, which may render the characters archetypal to some viewers. But within the ideological framework of the time, this abstraction serves a purpose: to elevate the suffering soldier into a figure of sacrifice rather than individual complexity.

Sound design contributes decisively to this atmosphere. The musical score is minimal, appearing only to underscore moments of reflection or transition. More prominent are the mechanical sounds of the train itself-the churning of wheels, the hiss of steam-used not merely as background noise but as a kind of heartbeat. This emphasis on diegetic sound reinforces the idea of time suspended, of a journey whose destination is less geographical than moral.

By 1943, when this film was released, Italy was in crisis. Mussolini's regime had lost its grip on large parts of the country, and the Allied advance was already underway. In this context, the film reads less like high propaganda and more like a gesture of ideological repositioning. It does not celebrate victory or glorify Fascist power. Instead, it places the Italian soldier in a posture of suffering, faith, and dignity. This shift in tone is subtle but telling: an early effort to reshape national identity around endurance and compassion rather than conquest.

This moral reframing aligns closely with what would later be formalized as the myth of Italiani brava gente-the idea that Italian soldiers were humane, merciful, and fundamentally different from their German counterparts. Although fully articulated only after the war, often in service of Italy's reintegration into the Western alliance system, the seeds of that myth are already visible here. The soldiers are not shown as occupiers, ideologues, or executioners; they are caregivers and victims. Their suffering is sanitized, and their presence in the Soviet theatre is stripped of political or colonial context. There is no reference to civilian populations, no engagement with the atrocities committed by Italian forces in other campaigns such as Greece or the Balkans. Instead, what's offered is a purified image of sacrifice, as if anticipating the need for a future moral alibi.

A particularly relevant comparison can be drawn with The White Ship (La nave bianca, 1941), a film of similar structure and purpose. Both center their narratives on military medical transport-one at sea, the other by rail-and both aim to construct a symbolic image of the wounded Italian soldier as a site of national virtue. However, while the earlier film adopts a more openly didactic and documentary tone, using real naval personnel and institutional narration, this later production opts for a more contemplative mood. The ship, in the former, functions as a mobile extension of state power and discipline. The train, here, becomes a kind of purgatorial space: a vessel for redemption, pain, and unspoken doubt.

Technically, the editing is sober and measured. There is no effort to build tension through montage. Instead, sequences are allowed to unfold with a quiet gravity, producing a cumulative emotional effect rooted less in plot than in repetition-ritual acts of care, moments of prayer, and brief, restrained exchanges between men marked by the weight of their shared ordeal. The absence of enemy combatants after the opening battle-and the complete invisibility of the Soviet civilian population-serve to depoliticize the context of the conflict and isolate the suffering of the Italians as the sole narrative concern.

That selectivity is not accidental. It is an ethical and ideological strategy that anticipates the postwar need to redefine national responsibility. By presenting its soldiers only in the roles of victims and healers, the film actively participates in a form of moral laundering. It does not deny the war-it reconfigures its meaning. What emerges is not a triumphalist vision of military glory, but an early contribution to the reframing of national identity through martyrdom, compassion, and spiritual endurance.

In this sense, the film is less about war than about how a nation might remember it-or be remembered by others. That it was produced before Italy's formal shift of allegiance only sharpens its ambiguity. It is a state-sponsored work whose ideological core is already shifting beneath its surface. What is offered is not a confident affirmation of values, but a portrait of human suffering shaped carefully to survive the coming realignment. The soldier who suffers, prays, and forgives becomes a figure flexible enough to endure any regime.

Although this war film, made in the middle of the war at its most critical moment in 1943, starts most regularly like all war films with a great battle, extremely well filmed, but this dramatically violent introduction leads to a totally different side of the war: a hospital train transporting wounded away from the war up to the mountains, and one of the wounded is Rossano Brazzi, here still very young. The main story of the film is about the patients and the personnel of this train, with many human and poignant moments and scenes, Rossano Brazzi himself dreaming away of his love and his baby, and his forbidding mother who wouldn't accept their union nor allow any marriage, and his wonderful subordinate (Carlo Romano), the only humorous or comic character of the film. The music of the film is very sparse but offers some unforgettable moments, like when all the wounded sing together to pass the time while waiting for a bomb attack to fade away. The mood of the film is very similar to the Russian classic "Ballad of a Soldier" 14 years later, it's the same kind of total concentration on just humanity as a contrasting opposite to the war, and humanity ultimately prevails - the end is simply glorious. It's a great story of another side of warfare with fascinating and skillful cinematography all the way, and all the actors are convincing, even the stern professor.

Inside a military train convoy, the lieutenant Alberto Lauri (Rossano Brazzi), sick, remember the relationship with Clara (María Mercader),a post office girl, and the opposition of his mother (Ada Dondini), horrified with his choose. Clara had a baby without marriage, and both were refused by Alberto's mother. When the train stops quickly in the city of Alberto, his faithful subordinate (Carlo Romano) leaves them to meet Alberto, that just recover of a blood transfusion. Perhaps from the cycle of war films produced in Italy during fascism that one be the most melodramatic. Its maudlin situations are in the extreme opposite of "La Nave Bianca" (1941), by Roberto Rossellini and its fiction built upon a documentary style. Although the first minutes could provoke a mistaken hypothesis of a more traditional war movie, that is far from be the case. All the apparent Army and medical hierarchy and prescriptions are nullified by the generous and paternalist official, a figure very common in this cycle of movies, represented here by Captain Bianchi. This movie seems more a compensatory fantasy for its white lead character. All important things rounds about him: the paternalist Captain, the idiotic subordinate, the unrestricted love of woman and mother. All dramatic or comic element that aren't linked to him, like the guy that get his dog with himself in a clandestine way or even the sister that is killed in the air attack to the convoy (in a involuntary humorous scene) are superfluous. Their tricks are very precarious, simulating the convoy advances with a very fake toy train and amateur props.