Very well executed

It really made me laugh, but for some moments I was tearing up because I could relate so much.

This film is so real. It treats its characters with so much care and sensitivity.

The movie is made so realistic it has a lot of that WoW feeling at the right moments and never tooo over the top. the suspense is done so well and the emotion is felt. Very well put together with the music and all.

Good story idea, but a ridiculous story realised, uniformly incompetent in dialogue and plot. Burt Lancaster, who could make convincing drama out of anything he's given, struggles in boredom with a completely incomprehensible role. If his colonel and Ingrid Thulin's W.H.O. white lab coat did reflect real-life critical faculty at the highest levels, we'd all be doomed. And how does an Army Intelligence colonel manage to reroute a train without getting national railroad officials to help? But, this is high camp, and there is a hefty load of distancing effect because a band of youths are singing the soundtrack while a virus rages among them. Surely this subverts disaster movies well before Airplane! ever did. Sophia Loren and Richard Harris are miscast. Lee Strasberg was given a smudge of a role, and Ava Gardner seemed to be playing diva just for laughs. No one appears to perform with any belief in the script. But, it chugs along with reasonably good flow to keep us wondering. In its favour is director George P. Cosmatos's trademark aerial photography which succeeds in capturing a marvellous sense of setting - a tidy opening sequence and a tidy epilogue adds some finesse. The cinematography is also very good. Jerry Goldsmith's score soars and prompts us about the impending danger even if suspense is small in accompaniement. The Cassandra Crossing is a good example of the "The Box Rule", a useful rule-of-thumb about movie advertisements. If it has a row of little boxes across the bottom, each one showing the face of a different international star and the name of a character, invariably a stock character, then....avoid like the plague.

It's so sad to see that a flick like this with a cult status never really had a good release. It do has a DVD release but it was just a ad copy from a bad master. Be aware that the copies out there were all cut for 4 or 5 minutes and that the only release so far hat has the full uncut version is the Flemish release, sadly it's OOP and really hard to catch, Even the US Blu Ray release isn't complete.Being an Italian flick I guess that must be the reason why it never was out there as it should be. But the positive thing is that it is a must see. The acting is superb and even clocking in over 90 minutes it still works. Some even say that Snowpiercer is the remake of Cassandra Crossing...Even as the story is rather simple this is a perfect example of a seventies flick about disasters and there were many out there back then.A must see if you want to see how acting was done in the days, see the difference now. f you come across his flick, pick it up.Gore 0,5/5 Nudity 0/5 Effects 2/5 Story 2/5 Comedy 0/5

THE DISASTER Movie is a sub-genre of the Action/Drama hybrid that seems to go on being popular down through the years. Decade after decade, we find stories of terrible impending occurrences and the number of diverse characters, perfect strangers, who find themselves caught up in the dangerous, deadly happenings; which ironically bring the varied and disparate personalities together and often in great dependence on each other's care and vigilance.AS FAR as ancestry of the film type, we can only guess; but it surely can trace at least a portion of its lineage back to the earliest days of the cinema. Even the movies of the by then well established filmmakers of the early 1920's realized the great potential in story telling that could be realized via the road to filmed disaster.EVEN the great Cecil B. DeMille applied the disaster element in his first version of THE TEN COMMANDMENTS (Famous Players-Lasky/Paramount Pictures, 1923); where he made the story both Biblical & Historical as well as Contemporary by the use of flashback from modern contemporary times to the age of Moses.TRACING the family tree of the disaster movie brings to light such titles as THE HIGH AND THE MIGHTY (????/Warner Brothers, 1954), AIRPORT ( ) and its clones, the "Sensurround" laden EARTHQUAKE (????/Universal,197?) And a minor matinée pot-boiler called ZERO HOUR (Paramount, 1957), which oddly enough gave birth to the low budgeted, big hit sensation, AIRPLANE (Zucker-Abrahams-Zucker/Paramount, 197?).THE DISASTER Movie can even trace its roots to John Ford's STAGECOACH (?????, 1939), which had all the elements; the only difference being that the tragedy isn't caused by either man-made malfunctioning of transport mode or natural causes, but by the impending attack by local hostiles.TODAY'S HONOREE, THE CASSANDRA CROSSING ( ), is one more obvious title to come out of those 1970's "new" and "more relevant" and "more realistic" school of film. The production is spectacularly mounted, with some of the truly most beautiful outdoor scenery to be captured for a non-nature film. One certainly cannot fault the Production Team as being too tight with the purse strings; for they put together a spectacularly talented and well known international cast.READING THE Cast listing one finds such notables at the top of the bill as: Sophia Loren, Richard Harris, Martin Sheehan, Orenthal James Simpson ( "O.J." to you, Schultz), Lionel Stander (off the Blacklist), Anne Turkel, Ingrid Thulin, Mr. Lee Strasberg (master of The Actors' Studio in rare film appearance), Ava Gardner (no Schultz, not the Ava from GREEN ACRES), Burt Lancaster, Lou Castel (where's Abbott?), John Phillip Law, Ray Lovelock, …etc., etc., etc.,………..ANOTHER positive element is the inclusion of Jerry Goldsmith as the Composer for the Original Score for the film. Mr. Goldsmith's composition of both the Overture (theme) and the Incidental Music is on Parr with his other work. The prolific Goldsmith was responsible for a veritable treasure trove of beautifully rendered scores. Perhaps some of the most notable original compositions would (arguably) be: PATTON (20th Century-Fox, 1970), PAPILLION (Corona-General/Solar/Allied Artists, 1973) and RUDY (Tri-Star Pictures, 1993).ATTENTION!! WARNING!! CUIDADO!! LOOKENZEE OUTENZEE!! Could be a SPOILER a comin' up!! OUR STORY……….A passenger train which is carrying a real mixed bag of passengers, which most any self-respecting disaster film would do, is making a crossing of the Alps from Switzerland into northern Italy. A terrorist purposely spreads some deadly strain of virus throughout the train and its passengers, which would normally require a state of Quarantine. The train keeps on traveling and somehow or other comes under the jurisdiction of Lt. Colonel Stephen Mackenzie (Burt L.), U.S. Army, NATO Forces.BECAUSE OF THE Highly Contagious and deadly disease, the Lt. Colonel allows the train to continue on its way to the unsafe bridge works that lie ahead of it. There the train would surely crash; killing both all on board as well as ridding Mackenzie of the problem of dealing with a potential epidemic.OF COURSE, the battle hardened and cold-blooded military man couldn't have known that the presence of some Physicians on board miraculously provided the train crew and passengers with a cure for the infectious malady by using pure oxygen inhalation. (There is another twist, but we'll not tell here!) AS FINE of a production as this picture is, and as interesting as certain of the scenes and sequences are, we cannot give it a full and unconditional endorsement; for we disdain the heavy and underhanded-handed method in which its highly one-sided, "subtle", little message is sprung on its unsuspecting audiences. It is clearly one of an Anti-Military and America Hating. It is crystal clear that this is the crux of the hidden persuaders contained within.WE FIND this sort of loading of the story with a highly charged, one-sided and distorted view of what is the responsibility of authorities in general and the Military of the United States of America to be deplorable, deceitful and deeply harmful to unsuspecting viewers.AT least a can of poison has the written warning, the antidote and the ever present skull & cross bones to give proper warning.AS for our Grade, both Schultz and hid good buddy (me) say * ½ or a D-on its Report Card.POODLE SCHNITZ!!

The description "camp" means more than simply a bad or bungled film. Something must draw the eye; some pop-culture elements for cross-reference help; dumb novelty helps. Cassandra Crossing has it all!To draw the eye: The Euro train, landscape, fashions, and cosmopolitan cast of hundreds, but especially Sophia Loren and Richard Harris in their mature prime. No chemistry, but what bods! Pop-culture elements, specifically NFL running backs as big-cast stars. Jim Brown's sentimental-sacrificial-negro-in-action highlight came in The Dirty Dozen, where he ran in his familiar style, but this time stuffing handgrenades into chimneys to deal death to cold, strutting, Jesse Owens-resenting Nazi supermen--only to be cut down by a mercilessly efficient German machine gun. Sob!--no fair! 10 years later in Cassandra Crossing, former running back OJ picks up cute little girl and runs her into safe part of the train, only to be mowed down by whoever those bad guys were.Dumb novelty: In an earlier comment TrevorAclea praised Cassandra Crossing for "what is easily the best transfer of a sick Basset hound from a moving train to a helicopter before the train hits a tunnel action set-piece in screen history." Given the size of CC's cast, who could predict that an uncredited beagle would receive so much screen time? Or that the spectre of human suffering would be displaced to a dog whose water dish is infected by a sweaty Swedish pervert-terrorist? Further displacing, after the helicopter transfer the mournful but lovable pooch appears repeatedly on General Lancaster's video screen, where Dr. Ingrid Thulin pronounces the canine to be "slipping into a coma." Then, just after the train's threatened hippie chick is announced to be hungry, we see the beagle in miraculous recovery, drinking fresh water in quarantine from sweaty Swedish pervert-terrorists. Where else to witness such unexpected, extended attention to a hound's endurance and triumph but in the Cassandra Crossing?!