Runtime: 129 minutes
Directed by: George P. Cosmatos
Starring: An all-star cast… and OJ Simpson
From: Several different European companies
No, I won’t be saying “RIP OJ Simpson.” I’ve known of George P. Cosmastos’ The Cassandra Crossing for years now (for some reason, it started receiving more attention starting in 2020…) and this gave me the push to finally check it out. The whole death of Nicole Brown & Ronald Goldman to the criminal trial of Simpson and his acquittal-which was due to the botched prosecution and not because he was innocent-was during my early teen years. Would you believe that the verdict was shown during school live? It is true and I know it happened across the country. You wouldn’t believe how big the trial was unless you were alive & remembered it; thank goodness social media wasn’t a thing back then. I don’t have sympathy for Simpson suffering from prostate cancer then passing away on Wednesday.
But back to the movies. I’ve discussed The Naked Gun movies before along with The Towering Inferno & Capricorn One so instead I went with the picture about… the Americans holding a plague at the Not World Health Organization in Geneva so three Swedes attempt to blow the building up but it is botched and one of the terrorists escapes on a train. How do they prevent the plague from leaving the train? This was a European production so no surprise the Americans were to blame.
The movie also belongs in the disaster genre as this was hot s--- in the 70’s, so it is an all-star cast. There’s:
Sophia Loren; her husband was one of the producers
Martin Sheen, sporting a tremendous head of hair
Richard Harris
Lee Strasberg
Ava Gardner
Alida Valli
John Phillip Law
Euro genre star Ray Lovelock
Lionel Stander
Ingrid Thulin
And even Burt Lancaster
This movie made me utter some phrases I never thought would have been possible. They included “OJ Simpson shared several scenes w/ Lee Strasberg,” “Wait a minute, OJ Simpson plays a PRIEST?!” & “Ava Gardner was a rich COUGAR in her love affair with Martin Sheen”! As others have noted, the movie by design was rather low stakes in the first two acts. It is not loaded with incident as the drama revolves around who does & doesn’t exhibit signs of being infected by the plague. The final act has the stakes raised-I’d say so-but The Cassandra Crossing (named so as that’s what they call a rickety old bridge the train has to cross to reach the zone of quarantine) doesn’t rise above being just fine.
The film does have some bizarre moments when it comes to the medical field and perhaps it wasn’t in great taste to have Strasberg as a Holocaust survivor and the zone of quarantine be a… concentration camp. Admittedly, many disaster films could be nitpicked for its storytelling or logic. The film is still fine as an example in the genre. Holy cow, what a turn it takes in the final act, and I’ll say no more. As loony as this movie becomes, there’s still the nice cast, the drama, the Jerry Goldsmith score that as sometimes happened, at times really carried the film.
The movie is not in the upper echelon of disaster pictures but was still fine as a 2 hour curio.
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