The 1970s had a genre that many loved but which I personally hated....disaster films. They all had a couple things in common-- all-star casts filled with MANY 'special guests' and some sort of impending doom for them all. There was "Airport" with a plane about to crash due to a maniac with a bomb, "The Poseidon Adventure" with a ship that capsizes, "The Towering Inferno" with it's huge skyscraper ablaze, "Earthquake" with an entire region under attack from the forces of nature...not to mention the killer bee pics!! In general, the films were very superficial and if you've seen one you've pretty much seen 'em all.In the case of "The Cassandra Crossing" you have the basics of this formula. It all begins with three criminals or terrorists breaking into a government facility. The place holds deadly illnesses and in the process of stopping them, some of the crap in the containers is released and one of the criminals escapes. It's a bummer (good 70s lingo, huh?) and the infected criminal boards a train...and everyone aboard is now potentially going to die. But the Colonel in charge of this* (Burt Lancaster) decides that no one will leave the train...and the disease will run its course. And if that means holding everyone captive in the train, so be it. What does the bridge at Cassandra have to do with all this?Through the course of this very long movie, you see lots of soap opera-like stories unfold...the old Jew who is afraid because the train is being re-routed to Poland (where he was in a death camp during the war), the rich lady and her boy-toy, the special agent posing as a priest, the doctor and his ex-wife and more. None of the stories are all that engaging and are the usual genre stories. Overall, I found it to be a rather long-winded and occasionally dopey time passer--just the sort of thing that folks seemed to love back in the day but which is no longer popular (thank goodness). It's not a terrible movie (until the ending!)...but it is silly when you think about it. *Apart from this Colonel, you see no one in any authority handling this situation. This is odd...and odder still that only a Colonel is in charge of such an important case. And how can a mere Colonel get the governments in Switzerland, Germany and Poland to take directions from him? Also, when the passengers begin fighting against the trained soldiers, how is it that the passengers are so proficient and the soldiers are complete idiots?? Inquiring minds would like to know.

I'm channel-checking right now and saw this movie. Sophia Loren and Ava Gardner and this is the best the writers or director could do? And O.J. . . .I think he did kill his ex-wife, but a great running back, yes. So, while I hate Pete Rose, why isn't he in the baseball Hall of Fame? I haven't heard that he's offed anyone lately. O.J. is still in the football HOF.Can you imagine Loren and Gardner in a movie together? As I'm writing this, I can't even remember the title of this crappy movie that I'm not watching. Sophia and Ava . . .now that was a pairing even a mediocre writer could have pulled off successfully with any kind of script. The two ladies could have done anything together. But this, it's like, "Will Trog be the sequel?" Well, back to DVDs.

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?!