Costa-Gavras's first feature and hence inevitable. Black-and-white. He adapted a novel by Sébastien Japrisot.
A woman gets murdered in a sleeping compartment on a train heading from Marseilles to Paris, so the police, led by Yves Montand, investigate. It's quite amusing and often sweet in its handling of human relations. I particularly enjoyed Charles Denner's snarky take on life and everything, and Catherine Allégret's straightforward ingénue. The shifting viewpoints are not treated quite as well as in his classic paranoid/political thrillers which may have been a matter of editing. (Christian Gaudin edited this.) The brisk pace made it hard to see everything in the frame (the details are often rewarding) while reading the subtitles and appreciating the humour. I did not grasp all the details of all the red herrings, partly because the eyeglazing final exposition dump mildly ruined the subtle work before it. In a similar space to Le Samouraï (1967) and Melville's demimonde.
