Night Train

A night train runs from Warsaw towards the sea. Jerzy buys a compartment ticket, but Marta is already in it; through a mix up they both hold tickets for the same berths. Neither will get out. Jerzy does not talk and hides the newspapers. Marta's former lover is following her and walks up and down the corridor. A rumour spreads through the train: a man who killed his wife is running and he is on board. The passengers start looking at one another. A crowd turns, all at once, into a single thing. Jerzy Kawalerowicz directs. Lucyna Winnicka, Leon Niemczyk, Teresa Szmigielowna and Zbigniew Cybulski are in the cast. It is a Polish production. The score is built on a wordless jazz theme sung by a woman's voice and it returns throughout the journey. The narrative happens almost entirely inside the carriages; the camera works in narrow corridors and upper berths. The matter it treats is a crowd handing out justice; the passengers who want to find the guilty man turn at one point into a lynch mob. The film puts little weight on solving the murder; the real subject is a trainload of people looking at each other. The characters' pasts are given in pieces and none is fully explained. Cybulski was one of the best known faces in Polish cinema in those years. The chase through the cemetery is the film's most remembered sequence. The ending comforts nobody and the passengers scatter having learned nothing. Its limit is expectation; the narrative starts like a detective story and gives no detective solution. Who it is for: viewers who like Polish cinema and thrillers in closed spaces. Who it is not for: it is slow, unresolved, and the ending cold.