Rating summary

Movie		2.0
Video		3.0
Audio		3.0
Extras		0.5
Overall		2.0

The Cassandra Crossing Blu-ray Movie Review

Reviewed by Jeffrey Kauffman March 4, 2014

Note: This film is currently available only in this double feature: The Cassandra Crossing / The Domino Principle .

The seventies are often perceived to be a decade of unbridled creativity in film, an era when a new generation of filmmaker eschewed the now largely dormant studio controlled system of production to craft more personal stories, often in rather idiosyncratic ways. However, any objective parsing of the decade’s releases more than proves that old ways die hard, and behemoth retreads were still being foisted on the paying public with great regularity. Shout! Factory has been releasing some interesting double features on Blu-ray over the past couple of years, with sometimes tangential connections between the two films. Their latest offering, pairing 1976’s The Cassandra Crossing with 1977’s The Domino Principle, is another kind of “strange bedfellows” duo, joined mostly due to their release year proximity as well as by the perhaps unintended fact that each of them attempts to revisit genres that had already been mined more effectively in previous (better) films. The Cassandra Crossing is a big budget, “all star” disaster movie which came along at a time when the disaster genre was already showing signs of precipitous decline. The Domino Principle is a paranoid political thriller that attempts to examine an all knowing, all seeing shadowy group of operatives that enlists unwilling assassins, and so is a throwback to all sorts of films like The Manchurian Candidate, The Conversation and The Parallax View. Both of these films have certain commendable aspects, though neither ever rises to any considerable level of greatness.

By the time The Cassandra Crossing trundled across the silver screen, audiences had already seen a bevy of stars trapped on a hobbled airplane (Airport), an overturned luxury liner cruise ship ( The Poseidon Adventure) and a burning skyscraper (The Towering Inferno). The Cassandra Crossing’s conceit was that this time the havoc was being wreaked on a train, though the film at least posited something other than an exterior threat this time, instead taking a page out of Michael Crichton’s The Andromeda Strain and having a seriously infected criminal on board the vehicle, potentially becoming a Patient Zero in an unfathomable outbreak of a genetically engineered plague.

The Cassandra Crossing is a film seemingly cobbled together with a checklist of just about every hoary disaster film cliché that had been utilized in the years leading up to its release. Burt Lancaster plays a duplicitous Colonel who is attempting to hide evidence of American involvement in germ warfare, while Ingrid Thulin (a long way from Ingmar Bergman territory) is a Swedish doctor trying to ferret out exactly what is going on with the Colonel and the now potentially infected trainload of passengers. Among those passengers are Richard Harris and Sophia Loren as an estranged couple with scientific backgrounds, Ava Gardner and Martin Sheen as one of the more unlikely pair of lovers to ever inhabit one of these films and O.J. Simpson as an FBI agent (!) hot on the trail of Sheen’s character, who has a few secrets (and needle tracks) up his sleeve.

The film is certainly star studded, but it’s also relentlessly silly and becomes even more so as it moves along. A “rescue” operation of sorts is hampered by the train going into a tunnel, just one of several such moments that may provoke giggles in more cynically minded audience members. The lengths to which the Colonel goes to deal with the “problem” become increasingly more far fetched as the story stretches on, and the denouement is one of those “what were they thinking?” sequences, with tons of “red shirts” perishing while most of the big names manage a bit of subterfuge to live to fight another day.

Arguably the best thing about The Cassandra Crossing is the rather elegantly melodic score by Jerry Goldsmith, plying territory that is strangely reminiscent of Michel Legrand’s score for Joseph Losey’s The Go-Between. The film is big, glossy fare that is a disaster of a different kind—one that’s uniformly uninvolving and even laughable at several key moments.

The Cassandra Crossing Blu-ray Movie, Video Quality 

The Cassandra Crossing is presented on Blu-ray courtesy of Timeless Media Group (an imprint of Shout! Factory) with an AVC encoded 1080p transfer in 1.78:1. The elements here sport the expected amount of age related wear and tear, though they are frankly in much better shape than some might expect. Colors have noticeably faded, with flesh tones often on a pale pink side of things. There doesn't appear to have been any aggressive digital tweaking here at all, meaning this is a kind of rough, unrestored looking transfer that nonetheless at least offers a generally organic and acceptably pleasing level of detail.

The Cassandra Crossing Blu-ray Movie, Audio Quality 

The Cassandra Crossing features an occasionally problematic DTS-HD Master Audio Mono mix. Dialogue is mostly cleanly presented here (with a very occasional hiccup of distortion), but Goldsmith's score is unfortunately littered with midrange distortion, especially in some of the more bombastic cues. That's especially sad given the fact that the music is one of the more successful aspects of this generally lackluster production. There's nothing downright unlistenable here, but those who pay attention to film music may be at least marginally disappointed in the fidelity of this track.

The Cassandra Crossing Blu-ray Movie, Special Features and Extras 

• Trailer (1080p; 2:34)

The Cassandra Crossing Blu-ray Movie, Overall Score and Recommendation 

The Cassandra Crossing has an okay, if patently derivative, premise, but its star power is considerably past its prime and is further hobbled by some bizarre casting decisions (Ava Gardner and Martin Sheen as lovers?). The film is certainly scenic as the train is diverted through some sylvan countryside, but the dialogue is often risible and the climax is just plain ridiculous. For fans of the film, the video and audio quality here leaves a bit to be desired but is acceptable if not outstanding.