Last Spring on the Train

Nihilistic ultraviolence can happen on trains, too. 1975's Last Stop on the Night Train (L'ultimo treno della notte) takes the plot from Virgin Spring and Last House on the Left and puts it on a train. Less well thought out than its predecessors, it's also a lot less graphic. It does have much better cinematography than the Wes Craven movie, though, featuring the characteristically beautiful coloured lighting of Italian movies of the era.

Two beautiful teenage girls (Irene Miracle and Laura D'Angelo) board a train in Germany headed for Italy. A couple greasy street thugs (Flavio Bucci and Gianfranco) also come aboard. One of the thugs corners a beautiful, intellectual woman (Macha Meril) in the bathroom and rapes her. The woman finds she enjoys the rape and from then on becomes leader of the thugs.

In an earlier scene, she's depicted having a debate with another train passenger in which he takes the perspective that society needs tighter restrictions, almost to the point of totalitarianism, while the woman implicitly advocates anarchy. So there's some hint that her taking pleasure in the rape is partly her trying to live up to her own philosophy.

When the teenage girls switch to another train, the woman and the thugs follow and the familiar mayhem ensues.

The basic political argument being made is obvious and not very sophisticated. The events that unfold are too implausible, and the characters behave too strangely, to give any force to an argument about normal human nature. The intellectual who takes her theory of violence into practice was better done in Alfred Hitchcock's Rope and Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment, among others. Still, this film has a good, melancholy score from Ennio Morricone that runs slightly against the grain of the film. And the cinematography is lovely.

Last Stop on the Night Train is available on The Criterion Channel under the title Night Train Murders.

Twitter Sonnet #1459

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They left bereft of wax but, yet, alive.
A train replaced the house and lunch a fast.
The slow were cut behind the mourning veil.
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