Sophia Loren and OJ Simpson catch the plague: is The Cassandra Crossing the stupidest pandemic movie ever made? – Telegraph.co.uk

On February 8 1977, in the thronged lobby of the Avco Embassy Theatre in Los Angeles, Richard Harris threatened to kill a film critic.

More precisely, he threatened to have his new best friend, footballer and all-American hero OJ Simpson, kill the critic. He began to sweat. I kept whispering, Im gonna smash you in the mouth. And OJs gonna kill you, Harris would later tell chat show host Johnny Carson and his 19 million viewers. And he kept sweating.

David Sheehan was a doyen of Los Angeles film criticism. This at a time when film criticism still carried genuine clout and an unkind review could shut down a movie. Sheehan, as it happened, had taken a strong dislike to Harris and OJ Simpsons pandemic-themed new feature, The Cassandra Crossing though that hadnt put him off attending its US premiere at the Avco on Wilshire Boulevard.

Harris, who, as a producer, had a financial stake in The Cassandra Crossing, wasnt taking the negative assessment on the chin. As the booze flowed and the finger-food was wolfed down he, with new bestie OJ in tow, confronted Sheehan.

Ashen-faced, the reviewer slunk off. Smiling and possibly high-fiving Harris and OJ retired to the bar. Their work for the night was done. But for Harris the long campaign to promote The Cassandra Crossing had only started. He would spend the next several months banging a drum for a disaster thriller that was starting to look more disastrous than thrilling.

Its an incredible picture, he would humbly proclaim to Johnny Carson. David Sheehan said its the Poseidon Adventure on wheels who needs another? Well, its dynamite.

Forty-three years on, the Cassandra Crossing has aged as only a terrible Seventies movie can. And yet, with its killer virus plot, it has suddenly acquired a horribly relevancy. Four-decades old and creaky even at the time, this five-star clunker nonetheless feels rippedfrom tomorrows headlines.

As it happens the specifics of the lethal infection around which the story is built are rather glossed over. We know the lethal strain is bacterial and induces a fatal bout of pneumonia (or not, see below). And that, if it ever gets lose, it could bring civilisation to a stand-still. So much for the escapist magic of cinema.

The biggest distinction between Cassandra-virus and coronavirus is that the former is man-made. Specifically its been cooked-up by the American military at a black-ops lab at the Geneva HQ of the World Health Organisation (then the International Health Organisation). Yes, this is a film so ludicrous it starts from the premise that the pandemic escapes from the headquarters of the WHO.

The silliness is quickly ramped up. Three eco-terrorists stage a raid on the WHO, trying to steal the lethal formula and expose the USA. One is shot, another captured after contracting the virus. The third flees and hastily boards an Orient Express-style transcontinental train bound for Stockholm.

In short order hes sweating his lungs out, though he isnt in so bad a state that he cant blag his way into first class. He also manages to high-five a six-year-old and sneeze all over a pot of rice about to be served for dinner. Quicker than you can say flatten the sombrero a horrible plague has been unleashed, albeit for the moment confined to the train.

Like all awful terrible Seventies films, the Cassandra Crossing features a random assortment of household names. Harris plays world-famous neurologist Jonathan Chamberlain this being the Seventies, neurologists could still aspire to global celebrity. But whats he doing on a train from Switzerland to Sweden? Well, its obviously because hes afraid of flying.

Also bunking down in first is Chamberlains ex-wife Jennifer Rispoli. She is portrayed by Sophia Loren, significant other the Cassandra Crossings Italian mogul producer Carlo Ponti (who discovered Loren when she was a 16 year-old in a local modelling contest in Naples). They are joined by Martin Sheens Robby Navarro,a drug smuggler passing himself off as toyboy of ageing arms-dealer matriarch Nicole Dressler (Ava Gardner).

Navarro is meanwhile being pursued by OJ Simpsons Haley, a Drug Enforcement Agency official disguised as a priest (obviously). He shares a cabin with Herman Kaplan, a holocaust survivor played by famous method-acting guru Lee Strasberg. Somehow Vincent Price, William Shatner, Oliver Reed and Kenneth Williams avoided being cast in the film, though goodness knows how.

The biggest mystery is obviously the presence of the enigmatic Strasberg, who picked his parts judiciously.The Cassandra Crossing was his first movie since the Godfather Part II, for which he was nominated for best supporting actor as Jewish mobster Hyman Roth. Quite why he had signed up to this load of viral rubbish is lost in the mists of antiquity. Maybe he, like Harris, was just chasing a massive payday.

The glitzy crew was topped off by Burt Lancaster as US Colonel Stephen MacKenzie. Lancaster comes off as under-enthused to put it mildly. Yet his character is by far the most fascinating.

Post-Watergate and with the smoke still clearing from Vietnam, Americans of the period had little difficulty believing the worst of their Government. So they may not have been shocked as it is revealed that, far from trying to save the infected passengers, MacKenzies job is to ensure they are quietly made to disappear and the truth about Uncle Sams bio-weapon buried with them.

Officially, the train is being re-routed to an abandoned concentration camp in Poland. There, passengers will be assessed and put into quarantine. However, the steel arch bridge they must cross, the Kasundruv Bridge or Cassandra Crossing, is on the verge of collapse. Under the weight of the train it will surely tumble downwards (the bridge is fictional, with the Alec Eiffel-designedGarabit Viaductin the Massif Central its proxy).

Thats what MacKenzie is counting on. Unfortunately for him, Strasbergs Holocaust survivor remembers the bridge from the war and is aware how unstable it is. He tips off Harriss Doctor Chamberlain.

This prompts Chamberlain and the other a-listers to stage a fightback against the US soldiers sent aboard in their protective suits and masks to lock down the train. Meanwhile it emerges that the lethal infection isnt quite so lethal the infected come down with a terrible flu but quickly recover, suffering nothing other than a huge appetite.

Cue clunky action scenes, model-railway level special effects and a stonkingly unsatisfying denouement. As the train chugs towards the crossing, Strasbergs Herman Kaplan makes his way to the front and blows himself up.

This blindsides the Americans (apparently content to hurtle to their deaths) and gives Harris and the gang an opportunity to hit the emergency brakes. Half the train still goes over in a sequence that resembles an outtake from Gerry Andersons Thunderbirds. But not the half containing our heroes.

Yet if clearly dreadful at every level Harris clearly didnt even go to the trouble of visiting the barbers before arriving on set at Romes Cinecitt Studios the Cassandra Crossing is nonetheless fantastically watchable. And not just because of coronavirus. Harris, who took the part after Peter OToole turned it down, radiates feckless charisma. He really is just here for the paycheque and visibly struggling to take it seriously.

Then you have OJ, still lining out for the Buffalo Bills in the NFL and summoning all the nuance of a running back breaking a tackle at full pelt. And he is, incredibly, sharing the screen with acting doyen Strasberg. Its like having Claude Monet present a make-and-do art segment on Rainbow, with George and Zippy helping out.

I watch OJ with great fascination, Strasberg would say. He has something which you dont only get from training or from work. He has a marvellous personal quality that comes over and is very wonderful.

Being captain of the football team is like being a director, OJ ventured from the set. Im just trying my best to be as fine an actor as I can be. Im trying to learn about the profession. And, especially when Im with Lee Strasberg, I have an awful lot to learn.

The Cassandra Crossing arrived at the tail-end of the disaster movie craze. As David Sheehan had picked up on in the review that so incensed Richard Harris, the Poseidon Adventure was a clear reference point.

As was the Towering Inferno. This was acknowledged by script writer Tom Mankiewicz (Diamonds Are Forever, Live and Let Die, The Man with the Golden Gun). Hired by Ponti to give the screenplay a last-minute polish, he immediately dubbed the project the Towering Germ.

Sophia and Carlo asked me to do a major rewrite on a film they were making, Mankiewiczwould explain in his autobiography .

The Cassandra Crossing co-starred Richard Harris, Burt Lancaster and Ava Gardner. It was at the height of the disaster movie craze. In this case hundreds of European passengers were trapped and sealed inside a train filled with a deadly virus intended for biological warfare. Privately, I called it the Towering Germ.

Yet this apparently typical Hollywood film was anything but. The Cassandra Crossing was a British-Italian joint venture. In his memoirs, producer and impresario Lew Grade remembers Ponti coming to see him in London with a new project. Grades first and only question was: how much?

Ponti may have struck Grade as stressed. The producer, part of a movement of Italian filmmakers who wanted to build their own Hollywood at the sprawling Cinecitt complex, had recently survived a kidnapping attempt. He had been driving on the Appian Way in Rome when a car pulled alongside and riddled his with bullets.

It was among hundreds of planned abductions during Italys notorious years of lead when left and right-wing terrorists tried to overturn the social order. There was to be a second failed kidnapping 12 months later. And a year after that Ponti would be arrested and later convicted of currency smuggling.

Details of the charges are lost to antiquity. But it must have had something to do with the Cassandra Crossing, as Harris and Gardner were also accused of illegally exporting from Italy currency and art works worth $10 million (the charges against the stars were later dropped).

By that point, everyone involved may have wished they could forget the Cassandra Crossing. Though it performed respectably in Europe and in the Far East, in America it was chewed up and spat out.

This was nothing less than a Hollywood conspiracy, believed its Greco-Italian director George Pan Cosmatos. He railed against the vested interests he felt were trying to sink the Cassandra Crossing, whilst promoting it in Chicago.

I hate people who hate my movie, said Cosmatos, later to direct Rambo: First Blood Part II and decently-regarded Wyatt Earp Western, Tombstone. I love my film. If people say they dont like it, its like saying my baby is no goodPeople dont like the fact we didnt film the movie in Hollywood.

The only person who seems to have fond memories is Martin Sheen. Perhaps he looks back on the Cassandra Crossing as the calm before the storm. It was while shooting in Rome that he received a call from Francis Ford Coppola to join him in the Philippines for the straightforward new Vietnam movie he was shooting called Apocalypse Now. What could possibly go wrong?

The Cassandra Crossing may not have been one of the best movies ever made but it was the most fun Id ever had on a set and one of the most talented casts Ive worked with, Sheen wrote in his autobiography. In addition to Ava and OJ there were also Richard Harris, Burt Lancaster, Lee Strasberg and, in the role of the heroine, Carlo Pontis wife the legendary Sophia Loren. The kids would come on the set and not recognise anyone except OJ, who was still playing football for the Buffalo Bills at the time .

Romes Cinecitt Studios lived up to its name. he continued. While we were doing the Cassandra Crossing, Federico Fellini was a few sound stages over shooting Casanova with Donald Sutherland in the lead role. Emilio [EstevezSheens son] would meet me for lunch at the commissary and Sutherland would be there outfitted in a long powdered wig and the ruffles and buckles of an 18th-century Venetian dandy [Casanova would go on to win the Oscar for best best costume design].

Max von Sydow would show up in a military uniform shooting The Desert of the Tartars and wed sit with Sophia Loren in full makeup and OJ Simpson wearing the black and white Roman collar. Just eating lunch at Cinecitt was like being inside a Fellini film.

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Sophia Loren and OJ Simpson catch the plague: is The Cassandra Crossing the stupidest pandemic movie ever made? - Telegraph.co.uk