La Bataille du rail (1946)

La Bataille du rail is a French war film first released in 1946, directed by René Clément.  The film is based on a novel by François Boyer and stars Marcel Barnault, Jean Clarieux, Jean Daurand, Jacques Desagneaux and François Joux.  It has also been released under the title: The Battle of the Rails.  Our overall rating for this film is: excellent.


This episodic film recounts the exploits of French railway workers supporting the activities of the French Resistance during the Second World War.   From the start of the Nazi Occupation to the Liberation, the film shows the invaluable part played by ordinary railway workers in defeating the Germans.  The second half of the film is concerned mainly with a daring attempt to sabotage a German convey heading for Normandy.

One of the quirks of French cinema is how few films relating to the Second World War were made in the decade that followed the Liberation.   Apart from a handful of spy thrillers, such as Maurice de Canonge’s Mission spéciale (1946), French film directors tended to shy away from war films, whilst Hollywood and Britain continued to churn them out at a prodigious rate.  The immense success of Alexander Esway’s Le Bataillon du ciel (1947) (which attracted an audience of 8.6 million in France) challenges the assumption that French audiences had no stomach for war films.  The reality is that few film producers were prepared to rake over their country’s humiliating experiences during WWII.  The British and the Americans had something to celebrate - the French, apparently, had not.  The Occupation would cast a long shadow over French culture in general, but its influence would be most apparent in cinema, where it remained pretty well a taboo subject for over thirty years.

Given their rarity, it is not surprising that those few war films that were made in France in the immediate aftermath of WWII should receive a great deal of interest.  The one that drew most attention was René Clément’s remarkable debut feature, La Bataille du rail, which celebrated the contribution made by French rail workers in opposing the Occupation.  Clément had made a number of short films prior to this (including several documentaries and the comedy short  Soigne ton gauche  which featured Jacques Tati) and would go on to become France’s most honoured filmmaker (winning two Academy Awards, five major prizes at Cannes and two awards at Venice).  La Bataille du rail was a major critical success that instantly established Clément’s reputation as a serious film director, winning him both the Best Director Award and International Jury Prize at the first Cannes Film Festival in 1946.   

What most sets La Bataille du rail apart from the majority of war films of its time is its cinéma vérité authenticity and complete lack of dramatic and stylistic artifice.  Somewhere between documentary and neo-realist drama, crudely filmed on location with a cast made up of non-professional actors, it conveys the heroism of its protagonists by convincing us of their ordinariness - they are people just doing a job that had to be done.  The fact that Clément was able to work closely with men and women who participated in the exploits shown in the film ensured that it would provide one of the most vivid and accurate accounts of the Second World War.  

Whilst the first half of the film is constructed as a documentary, the second half resembles a more conventional war film with its meticulous depiction of an attempt to derail a German convoy.  As spectacular as this latter episode is, the most memorable sequence offered by the film is the one where six railway workers are lined up and shot by a German firing squad.  This scene, filmed so intimately that you cannot help feeling you are there, is given an intense, visceral impact when the gunshots are masked by the sound of trains whistling defiantly in the background, as though the trains themselves were infected with the spirit of resistance.

© James Travers 2000

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