The Sleeping Car Murder

It is night, Thrown together in a sleeping compartment on the 10:30 from Marseilles are a frustrated clerk obsessed with sex, a flirty perfume company representative, a pretty girl leaving home, and a small-time TV actress scared of middle age. An awkward but friendly young stowaway naps briefly in an empty bunk. The train reaches Paris. Someone strangles the flirt after the other passengers have left.

The Surete arrives. Irritable and coming down with a cold, Inspector Graziani starts tracking down the surviving occupants of the compartment. But locating them takes time. Meanwhile someone else is having better luck-and simplifying the Inspector's task.

Revealing any more of the plot would be unethical; but perhaps this preview will encourage you to see I'he Sleeping Car Murder,which is an intelligent and exciting first film by a 34-year-old French director named Costa Gavras. Using an ingenious mystery by Sebastien Japrisot, who resembles Simenon but is fonder than he of elaborate puzzles, Gavras wrote an adaptation that is both thoroughly cinematic and faithful to the spirit of the book.

The way in which he has transmuted his literary material into images can be seen in the actress's recollection of her first meeting with her lover, a veterinarian who had just treated her lap dog. Across a deserted lecture hall they exchange smoldering glances; lightly, almost accidentally, his hand brushes hers. The lighting is muted, their mood is solemn. The effect is that of domestic comedy played in the style of grand opera-a pitiless and economical way of emphasizing the gap between the actress's dreams and her everyday life.

The film's visual style, to which Gavras clearly gave a great deal of attention, sometimes drops to the level of mere flashiness. Gavras will not always resist ostentatious camera angles and tricks like shooting upside down or through the bottom of a beer stein. But often the style is a tour de force of the evocative and apt. When Graziani is interrogating suspects, the camera continually tracks and pans in short arcs, testing different angles as if conducting an investigation of its own. When the entire force starts work on the sleeping-car case, the camera tracks alongside the policemen and stops, glides around them and stops, moves back to reframe them and stops-hinting, I think, at the shifting world in which the police's leads materialize, establish new perpectives, and then, often as not, dissolve. So firmly does Gavras believe in using the camera to express emotion that he will not be stopped by mere logic or physical limitations; to express nervous alertness he even pans when he and a character are sharing a phone booth.

Not withstanding the cleverness of Gavras' camerawork, the movies real strength lies lies in its acting. Yves Montand, as Graziani, endures insults with rheumy resignation and maintains a respect for his fellow men even when he can no longer stand to be polite to them. Montand's wife, Simone Signoret, as the fading actress, establishes the aura of attractive pathos that has become her trademark. And their daughter, Catherine Allegret, who plays the young girl, is a charming exemplar of wholesome patience and competence.

Of the talent found outside the Montand family, I was particularly impressed by Michel Piccoli, whose portrait of the unhappy clerk is a small masterpiece. Perspiring as freely as he fantasizes, nervously smoothing his sparse, slicked-down hair, and curling his lips into a tobacco-stained smile, Piccoli is simultaneously poignant, and repulsive. Charles Denner, Jean-Louis Trintignant, and Claude Mann never fail to be compelling as a cynically belligerent smark aleck, Miss Signoret's languidly egotistical lover, and a charming but distant policeman, respectively.

Let me conclude with two warnings. First: the version of The Sleeping, Car Murder being shown in Boston is dubbed-rather well dubbed, actually (the speakers can act rather than just read, and the dialogue sounds fairly natural) but dubbed all the same. The voices are subtly inappropriate, the speakers are often too closely miked, and one misses the nuances of the movie actor's performances. Second: There is a short. Most charitably described as a show-and-tell exercise on the Impressionists, it should be seen only by the totally deaf.