Night Train to Munich

"Night Train to Munich" is a rather conscious attempt by director Carol Reed to imitate the style of Alfred Hitchcock, and it succeeds much better than do most such movies. It is an entertaining blend of suspense and humor, with a good cast and some enjoyable scenes.

Margaret Lockwood stars as the daughter of a Czech scientist pursued by the Nazis. She escapes their clutches once, but is again captured, and a British spy (Rex Harrison) has to go undercover to try to save her and her father. Lockwood and Harrison are joined by Paul Henreid, and also by Basil Radford and Naunton Wayne, who had appeared with Lockwood in Hitchcock's "The Lady Vanishes" and appear here playing the same humorous pair of English travelers.

There are a lot of action sequences and a couple of good twists, with the crucial action taking place on a train. It's all done nicely, with an exciting finale as well. Some parts of it may be rather implausible, but the same could have been said of a few of Hitchcock's films, and this is only slightly less polished than his are. "Night Train to Munich" is quite entertaining in its own right, and is definitely worth seeing.

Rex Harrison plays against type to great effect in Sir Carol Reed's NIGHT TRAIN. the atmospere of the film is suitable foggy and dismal and the screenplay keeps you on edge. Harrison demonstrates a keen sense of underplay that until this point he never had a chance to play on screen. A film to be savored.

This film was made at a point of frustration and fear for the British. They had bumbled into a frightening war against a truly evil foreign government, and had watched helplessly as their ally fell. It is a mark of the strength of British character that this movie was made, complete with a healthy dollop of comedy in it (including self-parody). Basically the film acknowledges the treachery and evil of the Nazis and their collaborators (Paul Henried here), and the failure of the British to successfully account for it in the period of Chamberlain's government (Baldwin's previous government had tried to counter it but faced overwhelming pacifist spirit in the Labor and Tory Parties). Rex Harrison (aided by Basil Radford and Naughton Wayne) represent the Britain that pulls itself together to use the same deceit to snatch back what was lost.

As noted in several comments above, Radford and Wayne are Charters and Caldicott again, still traveling on continental trains, discussing cricket matches, and proving up to fighting the enemy if that enemy shows it's hands. Harrison looks almost dashing (complete with monocle) in his Nazi disguise outfit. He makes the comment about the Siegfried Line at one point...and nobody ever has explained it. The best single line belongs to Raymond Huntley, as a Nazi officer trying to understand whether the comment "This is a fine country we live in" was meant as a put down or not. After being left alone for a moment or two, he repeats it with different emphasis on "fine country". Then looking at the camera with complete honesty he says "This is a bloody awful country we live in." I am sure British audiences in 1940 fully agreed with Huntley.

Night Train to Munich (1940)

This British movie was made in 1940 a year after German and Britain began WWII. It is set in the late summer of 1939, just as the declaration of war was on the horizon. And while the filming and post-production is going on, London is being bombed by the Nazi air force. (The film was released in December, several months after the first raids.)

The most memorable lead is Rex Harrison playing an agent and double agent, falling in love with and saving the scientist's daughter (Margaret Lockwood) as well as the scientist himself (while he's at it). And then as a competing suitor, the dubiously aligned German officer played by Paul Henreid, who a year later would play a kind of counterpoint in the American Nazi film, "Casablanca."

Director Carol Reed marshals all these forces and makes a surprisingly terrific movie. It's fast, smart, fanciful, and patriotic. It's also really really funny, and the more you catch the British humor the more you'll be glad--at times it's relentless even as its subtle. The little barbs against the Germans, both as German stereotypes and as Nazi buffoons, is highly calculated. The British come off as daring and dashing, even the bumbling travelers rise to the occasion. It's often been commented that Harrison makes a very fit precursor to James Bond, and there must be a backwards truth to that because Ian Fleming (who invented Bond) was a WWII British OSS worker. Art imitating life. Imitating art.

And yes, this is an homage and reference (if not sequel) to Hitchcock's "The Lady Vanishes," including use of the same writers, the same kind of comic suspense, the same leading actress, and even two comic side characters from one train to the other. Reed even acknowledged the connections, as if he could deny them, and wanted no doubt to coattail some of the movies huge success.

It taints a movie to call it propaganda, so I won't. It's not, really. What it does (just as "Casablanca" does) is strike one up for the good guys. You end the movie thinking the British might just win this thing. And at the time that wasn't a foregone conclusion--London was only sinking further into the terror of the Blitz. Of course, we know that British resolve and resourcefulness won the day, with a little outside help, and this is part of exactly that.

Great stuff.

Carol Reed directed this wartime spy-thriller. And though it may feel routine, there are individual scenes and performers who remain vivid: the flippant egoism of Rex Harrison's British agent; the vulnerability of Margaret Lockwood's wartime refugee; the naked sensitivity of Paul Henreid's villain. All in all, an interesting romantic triangle.

The story opens in 1938, as the camera tracks into Hitler's mountain retreat over Berchtesgaden, and we witness the dictator ordering the Czech occupation. Hitler desires not only territory, but the talented scientists within - geniuses such as Axel Bomasch, an industrial wizard who barely eludes capture, flying safely to England. There, he is safeguarded by a British Intelligence officer, code name "Gus Bennett" (Harrison). However, the Germans succeed in arresting Bomasch's daughter, Anna (Ms. Lockwood). imprisoning her in a concentration-camp where she befriends fellow inmate Karl Marsen (Henreid). They both successfully escape and sail a tramp steamer for England: Anna, to re-unite with her father; and Marsen, to make contact with those who share his real allegiance - to the Third Reich. With the help of a double agent (Felix Aylmer), Marsen abducts both Bomasch and Anna, who are transported to Berlin. Bennett, angry at his own lapse in security, volunteers to travel to Germany disguised as an officer of Hitler's High Command in order to retrieve the pair.

The film then accelerates into a series of tense confrontations between Bennett and those he hopes to dupe, in both Berlin and on a train to Munich. The action culminates in a skillfully directed chase scene climaxing on the Swiss border, where the term "cliff- hanger" takes on literal meaning. Along the way, there appear various secondary characters - the 'team' of Basil Radford and Naunton Wayne, for example, are thrown in for their droll underplaying ("No copies of Punch?! Hmmm. Must have sold out."). But the real comic relief is provided by Irene Handl as a German stationmaster who, in one scene, brushes off Radford and Wayne like so much confetti. Her expert scene-stealing marks the highest moment of levity in the film.

The one element in Carol Reed's storytelling that always distinguished him as a director was a quality he shared with Jean Renoir - the generous feeling he conveyed toward all of his characters. Human flaws and defects such as professional incompetence and blind allegiance are noted but tolerated. The rigid bureaucracy of a dictatorial government is deftly satirized in the character of a German civil servant (Raymond Huntley) who, when confronted with a forged document, is asked by his Nazi superiors if he knows what this means. The bureaucrat politely replies, "Yes. It means I shall have to sack my secretary."

And in "Night Train's" final frame, we observe Henreid's Nazi, jilted in more ways than one; yet Reed frames him sorrowfully, as if he were a sort of Universal Everyloser. Reed's sympathy, again, extends to all. Such unusual compassion on the part of a director is what finally separates "Night Train" from other war propaganda films.