The Cassandra Crossing (1976) is a disaster-movie turducken. Subgenre ancestors like The Poseidon Adventure (1972) and The Towering Inferno (1974) were content keeping it simple, tracking straightforwardly the epically awful fallouts of a cruise ship flipping upside down and a gargantuan building collapsing like a Jenga pillar, respectively. The Cassandra Crossing, though, isn’t satisfied merely being about a 1,000-passenger Stockholm-bound train bolting toward a bridge decommissioned since the 1940s. What if it also, in a twist hitting a lot differently in the COVID era, had someone aboard infected with a new strain of plague? And what if the U.S. government, represented by a steely colonel (Burt Lancaster) and a dutiful, basically mute major (John Phillip Law), were OK letting the train crash if it meant not revealing the blunder of the pathogen’s failed containment?
The Cassandra Crossing is among the cruelest of disaster movies. How is anyone supposed to stand a chance when incoming peril is both physical and viral and coming at you simultaneously? It also, surprisingly, is one of the easiest to accept. The pandemic slant has a renewed eeriness. So does the presentation of a government more concerned with shrouding neglect around virus preparation than taking proper measures to protect a population’s health. It’s bruisingly funny, too, seeing so many passengers be up in arms about safety-related delays: inconvenience, not the very-real danger approaching, is what really pisses them off.
Unexpected latter-day pertinence still can’t push The Cassandra Crossing a cut above most disaster-movie offerings. It keeps up its tendency to throw an expensive array of stars into various uninteresting, soapy subplots to ensure the film stays busy when not shoving innocent civilians in harm’s way. It also retains the short-lived subgenre’s off-putting spectacle-making around human suffering.
The heavy hitters of The Cassandra Crossing are Sophia Loren, Richard Harris, Ava Gardner, Martin Sheen, Lancaster, Ingrid Thulin, Lee Strasberg, and a practically lost O.J. Simpson. Everyone is mostly just serviceable in parts not requiring much besides heroism or worry. Gardner, in proto-Samantha Jones drag, is an exception. She tends to be a lot of fun as the pampered, sharp-tongued wife of an arms dealer who uses her hot-blooded lover (Sheen) like a pet boy, confined to their shared bedroom doing headstands and heroin to soothe his boredom.
If you’re a big, established star in The Cassandra Crossing, that’s basically immunity. Glamorous Gardner avoids infection despite embracing and kissing a disconcertingly clammy Sheen. Harris and Loren go unscathed, too, despite the cameras practically tripping over each other to zoom in on Harris’ hands touching his mouth moments after an interaction with patient zero. Either your star power saves you, or perceived goodness does: whom the virus targets inexorably has a moralistic bent.
Like most disaster movies, The Cassandra Crossing keeps you compulsively engaged. The first stretch’s virus-spreading gets your nerves going just enough, even if it’s turned sort of comical by how much the spreader is written as a clumsy germ who can’t stop coughing in strangers’ faces while ambling around the train. And the final action sequence is well-constructed, abrupt in a way that seals in horror without resorting to the lurid protraction we anticipate from disaster movies.
But The Cassandra Crossing, released near the end of the disaster-film boom of the ‘70s, reminds you why the subgenre wouldn’t attract audiences much longer. The ever-mounting cruelty, after a while, loses its initial bad-luck shock and starts feeling contrived. Even fate, in one of her particularly mischievous moods, would be inclined to call certain plot points a stretch. There’s also the queasy offness that protrudes when tragedy en masse becomes wallpaper in a meant-to-be-exciting adventure. Though at least The Cassandra Crossing has the decency to end mournfully.
Peterson Reviews 