I saw Compartiment tueurs many years ago in a movie house in New York City. I walked outside feeling still overwhelmed by how great a movie it is. It is an excellent mystery with outstanding performances by Yves Montand and Simone Signoret, but it is much more. Most mysteries do not work the second time around. What matters too much is discovering who the murderer is, but not here. What counts is not just the suspense and action but something else, a profound moral statement. The film reminds me a lot of Hitchcock's Vertigo, in which the audience knows two-thirds of the way through the film what has been happening. Well, in this film the audience begin to catch on to something else, something more significant than the identity of the killer. We discover something more disturbing, the pettiness of crime, particularly of murder. It is what Hannah Arendt called the "banality of evil."
I like movies that have depth to them. I should, having degrees in several areas. As a philosopher and ethicist I relate strongly to what this film says. There is no greatness in criminality; by the end of the film we feel only a gnawing sense of all that has been lost.
