The Cassandra Crossing

The Cassandra Crossing is a 1976 disaster thriller film directed by George Pan Cosmatos and starring Sophia Loren, Richard Harris, Ava Gardner, Martin Sheen, Burt Lancaster, Lee Strasberg and O. J. Simpson about a disease-infected Swedish terrorist who infects a cross-European train's passengers as they head to a derelict arch bridge which is liable to collapse. With the backing of the media tycoon Sir Lew Grade (the head of the British broadcast network Associated Television) and the Italian film producer Carlo Ponti, the international all-star cast was expected to attract a widespread audience, with rights sold prior to filming, to both British and American distributors. Ponti also saw the production as a showcase for his wife, Sophia Loren. Plot When the existence of a strain of plague (vaguely identified as pneumonic) is revealed at the US mission at the International Health Organization, three terrorists seek to blow up the US mission. Two of them are shot, one mortally, by security personnel, but one escapes. The surviving terrorist is hospitalized and quarantined and identified as Swedish. Elena Stradner and US military intelligence Colonel Stephen Mackenzie argue over the nature of the strain, which Stradner suspects is a biological weapon but which Colonel Mackenzie claims was in the process of being destroyed. The third terrorist, Eklund, escapes and stows away on a train travelling from Geneva to Stockholm. Stradner believes that the train should be stopped so that the terrorist can be removed and quarantined, but Col. Mackenzie is concerned that all of the passengers on the train might be infected. Mackenzie insists on rerouting the train to a disused railway line which goes to a former Nazi concentration camp in Janov, Poland where the passengers will be quarantined. However, the line crosses a dangerously unsound steel arch bridge known as the Kasundruv Bridge or the "Cassandra Crossing", out of use since 1948.