Yawn. Poorly Filmed Snooze Fest.

Purely Joyful Movie!

Disturbing yet enthralling

Am I Missing Something?

Gregory Peck "almost always played courageous, nobly heroic good guys who saw injustice and fought it."(IMDb)And from the very start as his debut (Tourneur's "days of glory" ) shows.I cannot remember him playing a villain.A GI was kidnapped in Germany during his military service (it was a time when conscripts trusted their superiors,which was not that way in the late sixties;see the scene with the girlfriend );we do not exactly who abducted him:Russians or former Nazis.Peck portrays an officer who may seem cold and indifferent at first sight.The boy's father is a wealthy man who believes that money can buy anything: "your money does not mean anything here" says Peck .They have to deal with "night people" in the cold war.The most interesting side of the movie is:shall we exchange innocent (and even heroic) people for an unfortunate rich kid?Which makes Charles Leatherby(Broderick Crawford) the most endearing character of the movie.The selfish millionaire discovers compassion and sacrifice.The ending of the movie,on the other hand ,is too implausible to convince.Hoffy (Anita Bjork) is only an amateur and her bosses should have known better.

Gregory Peck plays a U.S. Army Provost caught up in exchanging a married couple wanted by Russians for a captured American soldier in "Night People," set in post-war Berlin. By today's standards, this film is on the talky side, with not much action. Although the script was nominated for an Oscar, it's problematic - the denouement was much too simple, for one thing.Broderick Crawford is the father of the captured soldier, and he does an excellent job. Rita Gam is Ricky, Peck's beautiful and feisty secretary. There are several TV faces as well: Buddy Ebsen, Walter Abel, and Max Showalter. Anita Bjork is "Hoffy," a woman who works for Peck yet may be playing both ends.But the film is really Peck's, who does a fantastic job creating an interesting, tough, passionate, decisive, and funny character. He's instantly both likable and admirable.

Nunnally Johnson has been awarded every prize a screenwriter can be given. This film, with its many strengths, demonstrates why as well as does any of his efforts. The storyline here is both complex and adult; it is a Cold War thriller with very-strongly-developed characters, fine performances and great B/W production values throughout. Johnson wrote the script from a story by Jed Harris and directed. The story revolves around a Colonel played strongly by Gregory Peck who is in charge of US forces in Berlin who are dealing daily with the four powers governing their sectors there. Three challenges weigh on him at once. The Russian counterpart he has been trying to help defect is murdered; a young US serviceman is inexplicably kidnapped after meeting the German girl he loves, and demands are made by the Russians to get into their hands two persons in exchange for the soldier. Then the young man's industrialist father arrives to complicate matters further, making demands, while the Colonel discovers a traitor in his own circle of operatives. There are many fine performances in the well-chosen cast, headed by Peck's very strong military character, aided by Walter Abel and Buddy Ebsen; others noteworthy include Peter Van Eyck, Max Showalter, Jill Esmond, Marianne Koch, Anita Bjork and Broderick Crawford. Lovely Rita Gam plays the Colonel's secretary and steals every scene she is in. I found the military-parade pre-opening too-long; but the dialogue, characters and situations were everywhere absorbing and amazing memorable; had Johnson done nothing bu the scripts for this and "The Dirty Dozen", his place in Hollywood history would be secure. I suggest that with all its fine technical and creative aspects, when viewers talk about films "they used to make but can't or don't make any more", "Night People" is exactly the sort of powerful and adult film they have in mind.

It's a fast-paced thriller about a mob of Himmler's goons in post-war Berlin who kidnap an American GI, the son of a big wheel in the ferris business, and who want to trade the kid back for a pair of burnt-out old anti-Nazi Germans so they can torture and kill them as revenge.Get that? If not, it's not too important. The movie will make things almost clear enough. It's a lot of fun to watch. The acting required is negligible -- the plot is everything.Broderick Crawford does his "junkman" number from an earlier movie, a blustering materialist who comes to Germany to cut through the red tape and see that his kidnapped son is returned regardless of the cost. The price is the return of those two anti-Nazis, one of them already deliberately blinded by the Gestapo because of his involvement in the plot to assassinate Hitler. By the end of the movie, Crawford has seen the human face of Cold War intrigue and decides that the elderly couple should be saved.His feelings, of course, are as irrelevant after his change of heart as they were before. The job is in the hands of stern but human Major Gregory Peck. Peck snaps out orders and calls everyone by diminutives -- Stansman is "Stanzy," Frau Hoffmeier is "Hoffy," Colonel Ludovich is "Ludy", Petrochine is "Petey", and so on, so obsessively that one wonders if Nunally Johnson actually visualized the script.There's a little hole in the plot too, or maybe it's somewhere in my frontal lobes. Peck discovers that his former girl friend Hoffy is actually a spy for the Russkies (or for Himmler's thugs, it's not clear). And she realizes at a critical point that Peck knows. How does she realize it? I don't know. In the scene, Peck seems to do nothing that would arouse her suspicions. Maybe she is a Jungian intuitive type.But who cares? You can't really take any of this seriously, not even the deaths that crop up in the story, because we have never seen the people who die. And the film is leavened with occasional shots of humor. Barnaby Jones -- I mean Buddy Ebson as the wisecracking sergeant keeps poking his head into a room full of guys listening to the radio and asks who's ahead -- the Yankees again? And Ebson also has to go through one of those scenes in which he samples a bottle of absinthe, grimaces, shudders, and starts to speak in a hoarse whisper before clearing his throat and speaking normally. There is a running gag about a doctor who is trying to quit smoking by never carrying any cigarettes around, except that he keeps bumming them off other people. In my opinion the most amusing scene is one in which a British intelligence agent visits Peck and the two of them have soft drinks. On his way out, the Brit pauses at the door then walks back and leans over the secretary and asks what that stuff was in the brown bottle. "Root beer, sir," she replies. He thinks for a moment, then comments, "Curious sort of stuff, don't you think?" and leaves the room.Enjoyable minor film kind of drags you along with its quick unfolding of events.