ALL ABOARD THIS ALL-STAR DISASTER BAD MOVIE HOOT-AND-A-HALF FOR UNINTERRUPTED, UNINTENTIONAL HYSTERIA!
Aboard a transcontinental train, renowned physician Richard Harris -- inventor of a process that "rejuvenates defective brain cells in retarded kids" -- gets a desperate assignment from Army ace Burt Lancaster at the World Health Organaization: Find the stowaway terrorist carrying a highly contagious plague virus. It couldn't possibly be the guy staggering around the train sweating bullets, now could it?

It's a pity Harris didn't first develop a process to rejuvenate his defective brain cells -- or those of fellow passengers Sophia Loren (Harris's ex, who writes best-sellers about him), Martin Sheen (as a heroin-addicted, mountian-climbing gigolo), Ava Gardner (Sheen's wealthy, wed keeper), O.J. Simpson (a narc masquerading as a priest), Lee Strasberg (hamming it up in the Helen Hayes slot as a quirky old concentration camp survivor) -- all of whom race from car to car mouthing some of the zaniest dialoge this side of Bad Movie Heaven.

Loren slinks into Harris's train compartment to proffer a copy of her new book, Brain Sell or: Dr. Jekyll Where Are You Now That We Need You? and says she's not really sure why she's there: "Just to take a look, perhaps?" Harris replies, "It's rather cold in here for me to drop my pants." Gardner tries (but fails) to look interested in Sheen, whom she met, she tells Harris, when "he decided he'd climb this sheer mountain face in Baden ten thousand feet up." Observes Harris, "He obviously made it." "Yes," she says, "and me."

Hippy Ann Turkel (then Harris's real-life squeeze) is bedding her boyfriend when Harris bursts in on them: "Do you mind?" she whines. "First some sweaty puffy, pervert. And now -- " Harris shoots back, "Which sweaty pervert?" After all, this train's crawling with 'em.

Our contaminated terrorist guzzles water out of Gardner's pet pooch's bowl and, in one of our favorite moments, he sneezes, then hurls chunks of mucus into a bowl of rice on a kitchen countertop. Do "disaster movies" get any more demented? Though (nonstar) passengers drops like flies, our heroes trap the disease carrier (who's practically foaming at the mouth) and Strasberg asks, "You're sure it isn't measles?"

Panic (and hilarity) erupt when men in white suits seal off the entire train. "I'm not coming back to Europe -- that's it!" bellows a shamelessly mugging extra. When you think things couldn't get any nuttier, Strasberg, hearing that the train is being rerouted over an unsafe bridge in concentration camp Poland, runs amok with a scalpel, sneaks off the train, gets shot dead by armed guards -- only to turn up in later scenes! "I think the bullet passed through," Harris explains to cover one of the craziest continuity gaffes in screen history. (As always, only the biggest stars survive in the fadeout -- if you call that living.)

With John Phillip Law, Ingrid Thulin, and Alida Valli.

Intrigue in Cold War Europe
Good, well acted and portrayed film of the Cold War era that might be true today. Especially good for those interested in warfare and defense related to the Radiological/Biological/Chemical Threat from terrorist groups. Great cast.

A good cure for insomnia!
This story has been done to death! A potential disaster on a train, heroes and foes. A covert government plot. The usual same old same old. The acting is poor and the suspense is non existant. The outcome is predictable. I'm sorry I wasted my money buting this movie!

Second class entertainment at its best!
Sometimes you want nothing more than to turn your brain off and settle down to a slice of Europudding. Lew Grade and Carlo Ponti's Anglo-Italian co-production The Cassandra Crossing is a perfect example. Full of fattening but empty calories and boasting an Irish, Italian, American, German and anybody else who wasn't busy that month cast of fading stars, a Greek director and shot in Switzerland and France with the profits from The Muppet Show, it's a prime example of that much maligned genre, the conspiracy-disease-disaster-train-action-thriller. Richard Harris and the co-producer's missus Sophia Loren take the leads as the glamorous twice-divorced couple - he conveniently a doctor, she a pulp novelist - who find themselves on the same train as Martin Sheen's drug smuggling toyboy gigolo mountain climber (seen in one surreal moment standing on his head on a bed wearing only Y-fronts while Ava Gardner applauds), O.J. Simpson's gun-toting not-really-a-priest (and yes, he does go down), Lee Strasberg's concentration camp survivor muttering "I can't go back to Poland" (some of my relatives feel the same, Lee), Lionel Stander's loveable conductor (yes, he's called Max and he looks after them), the then-Mrs Harris, Ann Turkel as a free-spirited hippie chick who can't sing (or do much about her boyfriend's premature ejaculation problem either for that matter), and, critically, Lou Castel's sweaty Swedish terrorist (described in one memorable exchange as a "sweaty pervert"). The reason he's sweating is he's got a nasty strain of Pneumonic Plague that the Americans were planning on destroying (honest) in Geneva before he and his ill-fated pal tried to blow up the lab.

While Ingrid Thulin's humanitarian doctor tries to find a way of saving the passengers and Burt Lancaster's American general tries to find a more permanent containment solution involving a rickety bridge en route to a disused WW2 Polish `isolation' camp ("It's a Warsaw Pact country but we can't do anything about that") in one of those flashing light control rooms with minimalist glass maps (you can just imagine them exchanging anecdotes about the days when they were working with Visconti inbetween takes), it's up to Richard Harris to save the day. Boy, are those passengers in trouble - he's such a responsible doctor that when he sees a sweaty Castel panting and heaving over a bowl of rice pudding he doesn't even tell the nun sitting opposite him in the dining car that she might want to try the trifle instead, so we know that a lot of the passengers aren't going to make it. Oh, did I mention the `cute' little girl? Alida Valli's governess? John Phillip Law's `sinister' military aide?

There's an enjoyably overwrought Jerry Goldsmith score (the only one to include an entire cue used in a previous score, in this case a reorchestrated version of 'Night Attack' from Islands in the Stream), some better than expected production values and worse than expected back-projection and one real howler of a continuity goof as the locomotive changes type two-thirds through the film. But most of all, it's just demented enough in its straight-faced way to be great fun if you're in the right mood. Director George Pan Cosmatos may have been a hack, but he was a very proficient one, as an extremely well executed and impressively edited opening raid on the World Health Organisation - sorry, International Health Organization's headquarters demonstrates. It also has some genuinely impressive camerawork (including a couple of shots I still can't work out how they got) and 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 setpiece in screen history. Now THAT'S entertainment!

First Rate Thriller
What distinguishes "The Cassandra Crossing" from latter day thrillers is that it emphasizes story and characterization over pyrotechnics. The film moves along crisply with enough twists to keep you on the edge of your seat. The imperiled passengers are full-bodied characters whose fate you actually care about. There were many disaster films from the seventies that were more concerned about body counts(i.e. which celebrity would bite the dust) that they bordered on exploitation. "Cassandra Crossing" elevates the genre and makes a case for it's respectability.