THE BLACKBOARD: YouTube link: ASSAULT ON THE PAY TRAIN (1962)

We did screen this a second time (at RARE NOIR 3 in the summer of 2023), and Eddie did show it at NC LA in 2024. Amazingly, it remains obscure enough that the YouTube link we found for it in early 2023 still works. If you let it slip by previously, here's another chance to see it...

Lo and behold, here is one of the best films we've screened in MCP's forays into international noir: ASSAULT ON THE PAY TRAIN (1962), from Brazil, directed by Roberto Farias. It is a heist film, but also much, much more: one is tempted to call it the first example of "favela noir" as manifested in the film's dissection of wealth and poverty, class and race (specific all the way down to a sociobiological dimension: genus, species, subtype). As always, the lack of working-class solidarity puts the liberating impulse of crime committed in the name of "reparation for decades of corruption" into immediate peril.