An Exercise In Nonsense

The thing I enjoyed most about the film is the fact that it doesn't shy away from being a super-sized-cliche;

Exactly the movie you think it is, but not the movie you want it to be.

This is one of the best movies I’ve seen in a very long time. You have to go and see this on the big screen.

This is an interesting and enjoyable war movie involving espionage, kidnapping and rescuing people in the early days of World War II. "Night Train to Munich" came out in August 1940 in Great Britain and in December in the U.S. Up to that time, the Allies had very little they could boast about to raise hopes and boost morale. The film setting is 1939 – at the official start of WW II when Germany invaded Poland (Sept 1, 1939). But, by the film's release date, Germany had since invaded Denmark, Norway, France, Belgium and the Netherlands; and, the Battle of Britain had begun in July of 1940. So, this film no doubt served as a morale booster at the time. While the Allies couldn't show much hope with battles being fought and won, they could make films about successes in spy and rescue events. While the story for this film is fictitious, there were many instances in which Allied and underground efforts helped people escape the Nazis. Early in the 1930s, British economist William Beveridge established the Academic Assistance Council that helped 1,500 Jewish and other academics escape Germany. Albert Einstein, John Maynard Keynes, Ernest Rutherford and others supported the group. This film has a fine cast, with Rex Harrison in the lead as Gus Bennett, a British secret service agent whose real name is Dickie Randall. Margaret Lockwood has the female lead as Anna Bomasch. The movie mixes some early witty dialog and humor with intrigue and suspense as Gus launches his rescue attempt to get Anna and her scientist father, Axel Bomasch (played by James Harcourt) out of Germany to Switzerland. This is just the second appearance of a comic duo who would go on to appear in a number of films with their dry humor. Basil Radford and Naunton Wayne are Charters and Caldicott, whom Gus enlists in his rescue effort. Paul Henreid plays a somewhat gentle yet nasty Nazi, Karl Marsen. While this is a very good movie, I found some things in it that were odd. First was the naiveté of Anna in her first escape to England with Karl. Why would she believe Karl that she needed to hide, and not go directly to British authorities to find her father? Second was her crass attitude toward Gus Bennett who had reunited her with her father. She was a Yugoslav refugee in Great Britain under the protection of the British government, yet she treated her protector with disdain. I think the comedy could have been greatly reworked here so that she doesn't come off as a nag and ungrateful complainer. Here are a couple examples of the comedy dialog between the two.Anna, "Nothing that happened to me in that concentration camp (in 1939, before she escaped the first time) was quite as dreadful as listening to you day after day singing those appalling songs." Gus, "With those few words, you've knocked the bottom out of my entire existence." Anna, "Pity I only knocked it."Anna, "You know, if a woman ever loved you like you love yourself, it would be one of the romances of history." Gus, "Since I'm unlikely to think of an adequate reply to that, I think we ought to drink a toast. England expects that every secret service man this night shall do his duty." He pulls the cork on a champagne bottle that doesn't pop. "Flat!"One quick scene I found very amusing was of a newsstand that had enlarged ad boards of Hitler's book, "Mein Kampf." In between them was an equally large ad board for Margaret Mitchell's novel, "Gone With the Wind."Finally, there was quite a lot wrong with the last scene and the escape over a cable car from Germany to Switzerland. When the Nazis arrived, bullets began to fly as Gus fends them off while the rest make the cable crossing. The distance had to be several hundred yards. The gun play reminded me of the "B" Westerns I went to as a kid growing up in the 1940s and 1950s. Those Western six-shooters often had a dozen or more bullets in them. In this film, Gus appears to have a 32-caliber or similar revolver. The Germans also have similar weapons. The IMDb "Goofs" section notes this. With the advantage of DVD, I could back up the film and count the gunshots. Gus fired his small revolver a full two dozen times. And, he and two Germans who had handguns fired them more than 60 times. There were no scenes of anyone reloading their weapons. Finally, Gus was quite the shooter. He appears to be 200 to 300 yards away when he shoots Karl. Most expert weapons sources say that the maximum effective range for any pistol is about 50 yards. Indeed, the military pistol qualifying range from standing is just 25 yards. The National Rifle Association expert firing distance is 25 feet from standing, using both hands. The silliness of these few instances detract somewhat from the film. Still, it is a very good movie overall, on a subject that later films during the war and after would explore in more detail. Rescuing scientists from the clutches of the Nazis makes interesting viewing -- especially if one doesn't have a big combat action movie to watch.

NIGHT TRAIN TO MUNICH is a very enjoyable WWII spy film, though it's also one that may be difficult to watch if you think too much, as the plot is awfully unrealistic and hard to believe. But, if you are able to put aside these problems, the overall film is entertaining and well made.Dr. Bomasch and his daughter, Anna, live in Czechoslovakia. However, when the Nazis take over the country, the Doctor is spirited out of the country because he is a genius at armor plating technology. However, just as Anna is about to join him, she is arrested and put in a concentration camp. Eventually, however, Anna is able to escape--thanks to a "nice guy" who is also an inmate (Paul Henreid). When Anna is reunited with her father, the Nazis spring a trap and take them both by force back to their native land. At this point, secret agent Rex Harrison sneaks back into Czechoslovakia and risks everything to get them back.An interesting addition to this film is the presence of Charters and Caldicott--two characters who were in Hitchcock's THE LADY VANISHES. They play the same people but with a different director--a very odd thing indeed. I liked them, though they did seem like very improbable heroes! The film is tense, the acting is fine (heck, I'd watch Rex Harrison in practically anything) and the direction is good. The problem is that sneaking in and out of Nazi territory seemed amazingly easy. The Nazis, unfortunately, were not that stupid and were also a lot more vicious than they appeared in the film.Overall, a better than average WWII film thanks to good acting and production values. Just don't look for perfection, as the film seems more designed for its propaganda value than for realism.

**SPOILERS** WWII thriller that has to do with the Nazis trying to capture escaped from his Nazi-occupied Checkosolvakia amour plating expert Alex Bormasch, James Harcourt. Alex made his way out of Nazi controlled Checkosolvakia to England with his daughter, who missed the plane by being stuck in heavy traffic, Anna, Margaret Lockwood, being left behind. This all happens just before the of German invasion of Poland on September 1, 1939. Within days of the invasion both Engand and France declare war on the National Socialist, or Nazi for short, state.Being sent to a Nazi concentration camp Anna is befriended by fellow Check inmate Karl Marsen, Paul Henreid, who helps her, as well as himself, break out of the place and sail to England. That all happened when the German Army Navy and Luftwaffe was too busy fighting the Poles to have anyone available to stop them. We soon find out that Marsen is really a Nazi spy who in turn gets the unsuspecting Anna to get her father out of hiding in the safety of jolly old England. This leads to both Anna and her father getting captured by a German U-Boat inside English waters. All that happening when Alex as well as Anne and that rat-fink Marsen went out a innocent moonlight fishing in the English Channal.Back in Germany Alex Bomasch is now being forced, against his will, to reveal to the Nazis the secret behind his super armor plating formula that's to be used to reinforce the Nazi Siegfried Line. The British M15 send in their top secret agent, before James Bond, Nicky Randall using the allies Gustav Bennett, a Nazi officer in the transportation department, to rescue both Anna and her father.The tough and nails and very flexible and acrobatic Nicky is played played by an emaciated 98 pound looking Rex Harrison.Catching the Nazi's completely flat footed Nicky ends up getting both Anna whom he fakes having an affair with, to throw the Nazis off guard, and her dad out of Germany. Nicky also gets help from British tourists Charters & Caldicott, Basil Redford & Naunton Wayne, who knew him back in England as a star cricket player and know that he's in fact not Gustav Bennett but one of the good guys; A fellow Englishman working undercover for the British Crown. Put on a train to Munich both Anna and her father are to be brought into the custody of the dreaded Gestapo whom that low down creep Marsen is a member of and in good standing with. The evil Gestapo are now ready willing and more then able to use every means at their disposal, even going so far as in torturing his daughter Anna, in order to get old man Bomasch to talk about his secret armor plating formula. Nicky by commandeering Marsen's government car has the trio-him Anna & her dad Alex-driven to the German Switzerland border where the only thing separating them from a stay at a Nazi concentration camp and freedom is a cable car taking them into neutral Switzerland!***SPOILERS***Humdinger of an ending with Nicky doing all the heroics, as well as acrobatics, for King and Country, in order to get Alex as well as Anna to safety before Bennett, now a Captain in the Gestapo, can get his hands on them. P.S The Hollywood film "Night Train to Munich" was made when the USA was technically at peace, or at least neutral, in the war between Germany and the western allies Britan and France. Still it showed where the US' heart really was in the film making the Germans the bad guys in the movie. Which may well have been one of the reasons, among many, why Hitler was always antagonistic towards the United States and its President FDR. In him feeling that FDR's ultimate goal was to come to Great Britian's, who was at the time under siege from the Nazi Juggernaut, aid! Both financially, like with the Lend Lease program, as well as militarily.This could have also been why Hitler so eagerly as well as stupidly jumped at the chance to declare war on the US, after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, when he should have known better by him being engaged with both the UK and USSR at the time. This illogical act on Hitler's part, who's played in the movie by by Billy Russell, would lead to his and Nazi Germany's ultimate destruction. Which in fact it did some four years later in the spring of 1945!

The French are ardently patriotic; the Germans swell with tender pride; the Americans get earnest and emotional; but surely only the English can ever have acquired the idiosyncratic habit of making propaganda by raising a laugh at our own expense? It's a trait that, I suspect, may well leave other nations mystified; but it is this sting of self-deprecating irony that leavens the best of British war films and is characteristic of its era. Coincidentally, it also helps to make them notable long after the event, where more conventional propaganda tends to become ponderous and slightly embarrassing. Englishmen of a certain class have always made a virtue of never taking anything quite seriously -- and so, in lieu of John-Wayne-style heroics, we have Leslie Howard or Rex Harrison serving King and Country under the mask of the charming, seemingly-incompetent amateur.In Night Train to Munich, Charters and Caldicott illustrate perhaps the epitome of English humour at its own expense -- as caricatures they could almost have stepped out of propaganda for the other side. We are intended to laugh at them, and we do. But they represent also all the dogged and prized eccentricity of the nation, a red rag in the face of Nazi efficiency and uniformity. They are insular and sport-obsessed, far more interested in their own affairs than in interfering with the rest of the world: but by jingo, if they do--! As a comedy-thriller "Night Train to Munich" went down very well at the National Film Theatre, and I was very glad to have caught the final screening of the season after missing them all when it played here last year. I did feel that the comedy elements were ultimately more successful than the pure action sequences, though. Given the constraints of wartime filming it suffers understandably from an absence of location shooting and some rather obvious model-work, and the big battle at the finale is riddled with unintentionally comic clichés, such as the revolver that fires dozens of shots without reloading only to come up suddenly empty for dramatic convenience, the enemies who couldn't hit the proverbial barn-door with a rifle while the hero is unfailingly accurate with a hand-gun, and a crippling wound that is conveniently forgotten when it comes to mid-air acrobatics. The beginning of the film also features one of the most bizarre episodes of would-be brutality that I've ever encountered -- presumably censored for audience sensibilities -- where a concentration camp inmate is apparently being savagely beaten by a guard, but the sound effects attached suggest something more along the lines of a petulant tapping with a fly-whisk! Watching Rex Harrison infiltrate Nazi Germany armed with nothing more than supreme impudence and a monocle, on the other hand, is pure unalloyed delight, as are his undercover scenes in England as he endeavours to hawk popular songs by means of persistent performance. His double-act with Margaret Lockwood as they portray the warring couple who inevitably end up united is both amusing and genuinely credible: the film admirably refrains from underlining the moment when she -- and the audience -- realise that she really does care for him. And, as always with actors originally recognised from performances in middle age, he comes across as amazingly young and debonair, and yet still unmistakably Rex Harrison -- a slightly disorienting experience! The real disorientation, however, comes from the casting of Paul Henreid in the rival role of Karl Marsen, the Nazi intelligence agent, a coup that becomes quite unintendedly effective from his subsequent Hollywood career featuring parts as romantic leads. Given that I'd last seen him as sensitive confidant of Bette Davis in "Now, Voyager", I instinctively assumed that his clean-cut Czech resister was to be the hero of the piece, and the role reversal took me as completely by surprise as could have been hoped for. But the character remains an oddly sympathetic one -- indeed, the Germans in general are depicted as harassed human beings rather than monsters -- and it is hard not to empathize with him as he watches his 'womanising' rival supposedly sweep the girl they both love off her feet. In the final scenes, as he lies wounded in the path of the returning cable car, I found myself frankly terrified on his behalf that the action clichés would culminate in Karl's death crushed beneath the cabin that has carried his rival to safety, and surprised and relieved when he was allowed -- albeit bereft -- to survive the battle."Night Train to Munich" is probably most effective when it is at its most flippant, whether at the English or German expense, and at its most formulaic where it tries to be 'serious'. But it has moments of genuine tension and feeling and is a fast-moving, entertaining picture. It's a long time since I saw "The Lady Vanishes" -- of which this is often cited as a pale shadow -- and the Hitchcock production doesn't seem to have left much impression on me over the intervening years; but I thoroughly enjoyed "Night Train to Munich", for all its flaws, and remain impressed by its sheer sangfroid as a wartime morale-raiser.