Avalanche Express (1979)

(On Cable TV, September 2021) It’s fun to go back to Cold War thrillers and experience the paranoia of the time. The era is rife with movies in which the heroes are clearly Americans and the villains are clearly Soviets, with no less than a credible nuclear war hanging in the balance. Seldom have the spy-versus-spy tropes been so complex and variations so elaborate. In Avalanche Express, a familiar starting point veers into a somewhat original premise, as an important defector is put on a transcontinental train going to western Europe, and the Soviet empire targets the train to eliminate the defector by all means necessary, all the way to causing an avalanche. The existence of such a train is nonsense, and so is much of the plot — but it’s the thrills that count. Accordingly, there are a few good elements at play here: The premise has juice, the cast is led by Lee Marvin’s exemplary tough-guy persona, and you can see here the elements that could have been used for a strong film. Unfortunately, the execution doesn’t quite match the early expectations. Once past the necessary bits of plotting required to get everyone aboard the train or in pursuit of it, the joy very quickly goes out of Avalanche Express. Some of the incoherence comes from production issues: both director Mark Robson and star Robert Shaw died during the making of the film, and we can only imagine what impact that must have had on the production. Other issues, though, are more fundamental to the screenplay: There’s a useless romance, for instance, that gums up the pacing of the film. The various incidents across the train trip are not very well structured, and for all of the good-for-their-time special effects used for the avalanche sequence (which is, surprisingly, not the climax of the film), the sequence itself isn’t particularly exciting. Of course, we’re looking at this from the perspective of audiences used to decades of technical refinements — a modern version of Avalanche Express (not a bad idea!) would use digital effects and time-tested structure. But even contemporary films did better with similar elements — I’m specifically thinking of Von Ryan’s Express, from the same director fifteen years earlier, which crammed a lot more characterization and action out of a train-bound journey. Even the final shootout seems curiously anticlimactic, visually flat and dramatically inert. Too bad — I think that there’s a better movie trying to get out of Avalanche Express. It’s just a shame that we couldn’t get it.