Complete credited cast: | |||
Sergio Rubini | ... | Domenico | |
Margherita Buy | ... | Flavia | |
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Ennio Fantastichini | ... | Danilo |
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Michel Rocher | ||
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Beppe Tosco | ||
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Popeck | ... | (as Jean Hébert) |
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Pietro Genuardi | ||
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Mariella Capotorto | ||
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Mariangélica Ayala | ... | (as Mariangéla Ayala) |
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Nico Salatino | ||
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Gabriella Lunghi | ||
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Pierluigi Morizio |
It starts as a studio theatre: a good-natured, bit pedantic stationmaster performs his job at a railway station in the middle of nowhere. Eventually a beautiful, obviously very rich young woman enters the station and wants to buy a ticket. She has to wait, they start talking, get closer - high-society meets petty bourgeois. Then suddenly the mood turns around: the woman's fiance appears and tries to prevent the girl from leaving with increasing violence. The stationmaster interferes and the film becomes a thriller about a fight to the death. Written by Frank Wallner <wallnerf@informatik.tu-muenchen.de>
This is a great movie for atmosphere, the story unfolding during a single night in a desolate Italian railroad station. The timid and lonely manager settles in for his night watch, when a beautiful woman enters, enquiring about a train connection... It sounds like a stage play, which it originally was. But it works beautifully on screen. The isolated station building in the rainstorm, the romantic undercurrents between the two leads - and the sudden turn to suspense two-thirds in the plot. Rubini does an impressive job as both director and actor, and the rest of the cast is also good. But the atmosphere and "train romanticism" (as seen in Runaway Train) is the truly great thing here.