Compartiment tueurs

I saw this movie only once or twice -- on cable in the early 1980s, I think -- and it has remained one of my all-time favorites. It is filmed in black and white, and is a French police thriller seemingly populated with good-looking and sexy men, which is always an asset for me. I also love Simone Signoret and she is marvelous in this, as always. I think her daughter is in it, too, but I could be wrong. I cannot really review it because it is more or less a dim memory, but I remember being totally captivated by it. I have always looked out for it, but have not been able to either rent or buy it. I only remember excellent films, and I guarantee that any film buff would find this highly watchable and enjoyable.

There have been a handful of directors, notably Clouzot, Delannoy, Kurosawa and Claude Miller who have taken the 'police procedural' to new heights and transcended the genre. To this select group can be added Costa-Gavras for his astonishingly assured directorial debut 'Compartiment Tuers'.

This technically virtuosic and gloriously inventive piece is impressive enough by any standards but Costa-Gavras has here taken the giant leap from assistant to fully-fledged director with consummate ease.

He has the good fortune of course to have the services of simply superlative talent both in front of and behind the camera and great material with which to work, based as it is on the novel by Sébastian Japrisot who is renowned for 'subverting the rules of the crime genre'.

This film is a heady mix of policier, film noir and mystery thriller with a sprinkling of black humour and succeeds as both homage to and spoof of those genres.

The cast comprises some of France's finest and one has to mention Yves Montand who shows a new maturity here with his greatest roles still to come, not only for this director but also for Claude Sautet.

A first film can be make-or-break and here Costa-Gavras is setting out his stall and declaring "Here I am!" Luckily for us, here he stayed.

"The Sleeping Car Murders" is a quintessential and bona fide and prototypic Giallo, and yet at the same time … NOT a Giallo at all. Gialli are – generally speaking – Italian productions from the early 70's with a script written directly for the screen. "The Sleeping Car Murders" is French, released during the mid 60's (when Mario Bava only just kick-started the Giallo concept in Italy) and the script was adapted from a novel by Sébastien Japristot. Surely both Japristot and director Costa-Gavras didn't had a clue what a Giallo in fact was and simply aimed to deliver a good old-fashioned whodunit that would keep the reader/viewer guessing until the very end. Well, the least you could say is … they succeeded! "The Sleeping Car Murders" is an engaging, intelligent and convoluted murder-mystery with a tremendous amount of effective red herrings, detailed character drawings and one perplexedly flawless conclusion. I honestly can't fathom why this movie is so little known, especially since it concerns the writer of "A Very Long Engagement" and the director of the political top thriller "Z". If this exact same story were filmed by, say, Alfred Hitchcock, I bet the film would have ranked high in this website's top 250.

Speaking of Hitchcock; several of his film revolved on the potentially perfect murder plot (like "Strangers on a Train", "Dial M for Murder"…) but – in my humble opinion – this is the film which comes up with the most ideal and waterproof scheme to get away with murder. I've rarely been overwhelmed and impressed as much as when upon witnessing the denouement of "The Sleeping Car Murders". Obviously I can't reveal too much about the climax, but it's so damn great that I really was almost tempted to select some random people and try out the formula myself! Six strangers share a compartment on the night train to Paris, one of them being a fare dodger who met up with a cute young girl in the compartment itself. The next morning one of travelers, a woman, lies murdered in her bed and a hugely complicated police investigation led by the cynical Inspector Graziani ensues. The next following days, however, the other residents of the compartment are murdered – Agatha Christie style - in cold blood as well, as if the killer wants to eliminate all potential witnesses before they have a chance to talk to the police. With the number of compartment survivors rapidly decreasing, the fare dodger and his girlfriend will have to seek protection before the killer finds them.

The set-up of "The Sleeping Car Murders" is brilliant, without any form of exaggeration, and the tight screenplay fills in every tiny detail and remains always several steps ahead of even the cleverest viewers. The plot patiently takes its time to draw a detailed portrait of every witness and, since they each have their own dark secrets and suspicious characteristics, they could all be the culprits. The structure and unfolding of the plot is truly genius here. Whenever you're sure you figured out the killer's identity, he/she gets killed or some other type of twist points out he/she couldn't have done it. The film also gives some marvelous and realistic insight into the progress of a police murder investigation, like stressed Inspectors, false attention-seeking witnesses, dead-end leads, media circuses and a lot of hatred from wrongfully accused suspects. The entire cast and crew also contributes a great deal to the high level of brilliance of the film as well. This may perhaps have been Costa-Gavras' long-feature debut as a director, but his obvious talents and straightforward vision place his right away up there with the greatest film-makers ever. The performances, particularly from Simone Signoret and Yves Montand, are just as top-notch as every other tiniest detail in the rest of this ingenious but shamefully overlooked production.

This film, the original French title of which is COMPARTIMENT TUEURS, is known in English as THE SLEEPING CAR MURDER. I don't believe it has ever been available with English subtitles on DVD or video. I obtained a poor DVD copy of an off the air tape, which was dubbed into English. Despite the poor quality of my copy, it was well worth viewing. The film is directed and scripted by the famous Costa-Gavras, but is one of his least known films, because of the lack of distribution. It goes at a cracking pace and has a splendid cast. Probably the best job of acting is done by Michel Piccoli as a hopeless, creepy lech who is on the edge of madness and can't make it with women despite his uncontrollable lusts and interior rants of frustration, which we hear as voice-overs. Tthe film is filled with other well known actors. Yves Montand plays a world-weary Paris police inspector, Simone Signoret plays an aging woman who has fallen hopelessly in love with a mysterious young man played by Jean-Louis Trintignant. The scene where Montand interviews Signoret (the two in real life were a well known couple, as most people are aware) is amusing, because they struggle to control their giggles. Catherine Allégret plays a young girl just travelling to Paris for the first time in a sleeping car with five other people, two of whom are Signoret and Piccoli. They are on an overnight train journey from Marseilles (although the story starts at Avignon) to Paris. Upon arrival, a glamorous woman in the compartment is discovered to have been strangled to death. The police set about trying to find the killer and start by attempting to round up all the people who had spent the night in the sleeping car. But then, one by one, before the police can get to them, the people in the sleeping car are brutally killed by the same person, presumably to get rid of witnesses to the strangling of the woman in the sleeping car. However, the story has a lot more surprises than that. The film is based upon a novel by the very clever writer Sébastian Japrisot, who is famous for A VERY LONG ENGAGEMENT (2004) starring the Elf, Audrey Tautou, and THE CHILDREN OF THE MARSHLAND (1999, see my forthcoming review). This was the first feature film directed by Costa-Gavras, who was later to shake the world with his powerful political dramas such as Z, STATE OF SIEGE, MISSING, and MUSIC BOX. He is still with us, aged 81, and directed the film CAPITAL starring Gabriel Byrne and Philippe Duclos (one of my favourite actors) as recently as 2012, when he was 79. One curiosity of the casting is that Claude Berri appears as a porter in the film, though uncredited. It was in this same year that he produced his first short film, LE POULET. He had already been acting for twelve years. This film has many twists and turns and an extraordinarily ingenious plot. I will not spoil things by even hinting at an explanation of it. Costa-Gavras directs with verve and intensity, and he achieves a spectacular success with the complicated filming of a sequence where a speeding car is being chased by a gang of motorcycles. It is no easy thing to keep track of half a dozen speeding vehicles of different sizes streaking across the streets of Paris at night, and make it look convincing. The cinematography by Jean Tournier is a tour de force, and the editing by Christian Gaudin enables the director to achieve his sense of an insoluble mystery hurtling over a cliff into the unknown at ever-increasing speed, with Yves Montand, who is heavy-lidded and has a cold, streaking after it, determined to find out whodunit if it is the last thing he does (I mean, the last thing he does before going to sleep, as he so laid back that one often does not know whether he is thinking or napping). The spider's web of complexity of this film's plot and the explosive speed at which it travels creates what was to be the trademark Costa-Gavras sense of danger and excitement from this, his very first film. If you can find it and manage to see it, you certainly won't regret it. What a way to start his career as a director!

Six people are in a train sleeping car. One of them is murdered. Thus begins a fine thriller with some really good suspense. The story's underlying premise is clever and quite unusual for its time.

The main problem here is the dialogue, which makes character identification unnecessarily hard. In the first 13 minutes, nine major characters are introduced, but no names. People refer to each other as "you" and "miss" and "she". Fully 18 minutes elapse before we know the names of all six sleeping car occupants. Even then we have only names, but no way to connect the names with the faces. As the plot moves along, additional characters are introduced, which further muddles a suspect pool that is already unclear. Because of the sloppy script writing, this is one of the most frustrating murder mysteries I have ever watched. Some simple changes in the script's dialogue could have made the characters so much easier to identify.

The film's chilling suspense is reminiscent of Hitchcock. The solution to the whodunit puzzle is quite interesting, and foreshadowed by clues that are effectively subtle. Another plus is the presence of the lovely, and talented, Simone Signoret.

"Compartiment tueurs" is a good thriller. If the characters had been better defined the film could also have been a great whodunit.