Sleeping Car to Trieste

This is a remake of 1932's Rome Express, which is a far better film and stars the seedy and sinister Mr Dane Calthrop. This version is slow and plodding, and the humour is mainly heavy handed. There is an unnecessary subplot about an Englishman trying to explain English cookery to a French chef (I'm not going back to the Good Old Days - I remember that food).

Best things about this version are David Tomlinson as the old schoolfriend who turns up inappositely, and Hugh Burden as the put-upon secretary. The McGuffin is a diary containing secrets that might start a war with an unspecified country, rather than a stolen painting. The adulterous couple are sexless as only the English can be.

Jean Kent is always worth watching, but whoever designed her frumpy wardrobe should be condemned to selling long underwear in British Home Stores. That hat with the two horns - or are they ice cream cones? There is a subplot about two French girls who are smuggling model hats, and they are rather good, as is Bonar Colleano as a wisecracking American soldier. His wisecracks really are funny. His mate the birdwatcher is good, too.

But overall - it's as stodgy as an English suet pudding.

... on a train maneuvering to obtain a stolen diary with international implications. The main cast is Jean Kent, Albert Lieven, Derrick De Marney, and David Tomlinson, with many others in an ensemble cast that tries its best to weave together a half dozen stories, not all of which are interesting. De Marney I expected the most from, as I liked him in Hitchcock's Young and Innocent (1937), but he has matured here into blandness. Lieven I didn't know at all, and he is good and savage as the head spy. Tomlinson with the jug ears is always fun to watch, the pip-pip cheerio Brit.

However -- and it's a big however -- this is a remake of Rome Express from 1932, and it doesn't have near the excitement and suspense of the original. The original had Esther Ralston and a ton of Hitchcock actors: Gordon Harker, Donald Calthrop, Joan Barry, Cedric Hardwicke, and Frank Vosper. Most importantly, it had Conrad Veidt as the head spy. Good as Lieven is in the remake, he can't top Veidt, and really no one could. Veidt gives a strange shading to the most innocuous lines -- he's the kind of villain who would knife Granny if she got too nosy. (He also resembles Bruno Hauptmann somewhat -- I wonder if audiences in 1932 made that connection.)

The 1948 version is good, but the 1932 version is more fun to watch. Both have a killer climactic scene in the train's luggage car -- a chance for both Veidt and later, Lieven, to shine.

As an American, I am always interested to see how Americans are portrayed in European films, particularly films made prior to WWII and in the years immediately following it.

The American in this film is portrayed as a vulgar contrast to the more sophisticated Europeans on board the train. He is a boozing, whistling, skirt-chasing Italian-American GI with a New York accent. (Why are they always from New York?) He is contrasted with the British passengers in two notable ways: First, his passion for the fairer sex is more overt and he comes across as wolfish in his pursuit of the young women in the film. This is contrasted with the discrete way in which the adulterous British couple on board the train are conducting their affair. When the two young French woman spurn his attempts to have a drinking party with them in their sleeping compartment, one says to him "We no longer wish to be liberated!" or words to that effect. This is a revealing statement about how the American military presence in postwar Europe was wearing thin the patience of Europeans.

Second, the magazines this American GI reads are prominently displayed so as to ensure that the audience can see them. They are the standard popular American mediocrities of the day: Saturday Evening Post, Life Magazine, etc. This is contrasted with the more scholarly (albeit boring) readings of bird-watching Britisher sharing his compartment.

Overall, the American in this film is the stereotypical boorish American so common in European films of this era. His portrayal, however, is not worse than Hollywood's stereotypes of Europeans.

Please note that this is not a criticism, but rather an observation. Americans are not singled out for criticism; the film traffics in several stereotypes (the cheapness of Scotchmen, for example) and does so mainly in a vein of comedic irony. Even the British get their own send-ups in this film.

A combination of Allan MacKinnon's inspired adaptation, and good casting and direction add up to a rare example of a remake being as entertaining as the original. Albert Lieven as Zurta may lack the physical menace Conrad Veidt brought to the part, but his persona as a charming ruthless assassin is succinctly established within the first couple of minutes as he murders in cold blood prior to strolling nonchalantly away. Alan Wheatley was a sound choice as the double-crossing furtive character of Poole, in a role not dissimilar from the one he'd played in Brighton Rock shortly before. Gordon Harker's hearty golfing bore is replaced by two characters, David Tomlinson's well-meaning but thoroughly obtuse Bishop, and David Hutcheson's garrulous patronising Denning, ponderously lecturing the chef how to make 'Roly-Poly Pudding'. Paul Dupuis' Inspector Jolif is a big improvement on his counterpart in the original. The 'MacGuffin' of the politically explosive stolen diary is quite an advancement on the stolen painting in Rome Express, making a more convincing reason to warrant the involvement of the bullying McBain, as well as providing the establishing scene in the embassy, although the motivation of Jean Kent's enigmatic spy Valya is never really explained. Plenty of sly humour too all adds up to an entertaining ninety minutes or so.

This a delightful detective thriller, made in the inimitable British post-war manner. The cast is comprised of more than a dozen unusual characters who have taken the Orient Express to Trieste. A few of them are innocent and charming, but most of them are law-breakers on one level or another, their crimes ranging from evading customs duties to adultery, theft, assault, and murder.

The plot concerns a stolen diary, but the real action is trying to figure out who is in whose compartment at any given time, because as the police move in on the murderer, the matter of timing and alibis becomes of paramount importance.

The documentary shots of the train itself are exemplary. If you are a train buff, you will greatly enjoy this crude, lumbering, noisy hunk of iron, a giant boiler on wheels, barreling down the tracks as the people inside change compartments, eat, drink, and plot their petty and grand crimes.