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Night Train to Munich

A man and a woman on a train. Sinister agents entrusted to kill one of them, or both of them. If the man and the women get to their destination in time and in one piece, they’re assured safety. But time is running out. And the sinister forces are closing in…

If you’re already an adept at the conventions of classic suspense cinema, you know that the above sounds like a broad scenario for a film by the master of suspense, Alfred Hitchcock. But the crackerjack 1940 thriller Night Train To Munich, now streaming on Netflix, was made in Great Britain after Hitch decamped for Hollywood to make, to begin with, the romantic thriller Rebecca.

Since it’s 1940, this thriller has a dimension that was heretofore absent, or at least in the background, in earlier British thrillers like The 39 Steps and The Lady Vanishes. The opening credits feature the unsettling musical strains of “Deutschland Uber Alles,” and a title card after that informs us “The action of this film takes place during the year preceding the war, and on the night of September 3rd, 1939.” The bad guys are Nazis, they want a Czech scientist to give up his secrets, and they’re using his daughter, played by Margaret Lockwood (who had been the feisty heroine of Lady Vanishes) as leverage. It’s up to insouciant British agent Rex Harrison to save her and her dad, and he’s got to go deep undercover, that is, pose as Nazi officer, to get the job done.

The movie also features “Paul Von Hernried,” who later will make his way to Hollywood as Paul Heinreid) and stand up against the Nazis in the Universally Beloved Old Movie™ Casablanca. Early on in the movie Henreid gives a fiery speech—“You hate the truth, because in the end it will destroy you and your bankrupt philosophy!”—That could pass muster with his Casablanca character Victor Laszlo. But his character here isn’t what he seems, and the movie’s most tense moments come during the cat-and-mouse games he’s playing with Harrison’s character as they both fail to enjoy the ride on the film’s title train.

The director here is Carol Reed, and it’s clear that he, like many other then-contemporary British directors, was under the influence of Hitch. The movie’s opening shot (see above), a traveling view of Hitler’s headquarters, is clearly in debt to a similar long view in the first moments of The Lady Vanishes. Reed’s direction here is brisk, coherent; he hasn’t yet become enamored of the Dutch angles that would stylize his great post-WWII picture The Third Man. Lockwood is both feisty and fetching, while Harrison has great energy. A far remove from Henry Higgins here, he demonstrates the qualities that briefly earned him the gossip nickname “Sexy Rexy.”

Adding to the fun are actor Basil Radford and Naunton Wayne, playing a pair of veddy British sporting fellows named Charters and Caldicott. Irritated at the inconveniences of pre-war train travel in Germany, they become not-entirely unwitting players in Harrison’s scheme to rescue the Czechs. These characters were first seen in, yes, The Lady Vanishes, which shares the same screenwriters (Sidney Gilliat and Frank Launder) as this picture. The scribes would bring back the pair in two more films, and the characters toplined a 1980s BBC TV series. The somewhat out-of-it cricket nuts are the quintessence of a particular strain of British humor.

And the movie is pretty light-hearted for a picture about going up against the Nazi menace. Part of that has to do with boosting war morale, and then there’s the perhaps willful ignorance of the period, before the full awfulness of the German scheme of the time was known. But the delights are many, as in the delight Harrison takes at outwitting the baddies a one-liner at a time, not to mention the pre-romantic banter between him and Lockwood. “You think such a simple plan will work?” Lockwood asks her protector. “I have a very simple mind,” Harrison shoots back.

THE DESCENDENTS OF NIGHT TRAIN TO MUNICH

CASABLANCA — Night Train to Munich was kind of a first salvo in the British Cinema war effort. More a romance than a suspenser, 1942’s Casablanca nonetheless mixed thrills with high-flown sentiment in a not dissimilar way. And, as mentioned above, Night Train thrust future Casablanca co-star Paul Heinreid into Hollywood prominence.

RESERVOIR DOGS, PULP FICTION — Before there was a Quentin Tarantino Universe with recurring and related characters threading through ostensibly unrelated movies, there were screenwriters Sidney Gilliat and Frank Launder, writing their amusing characters Charters and Caldicott into seemingly unrelated motion pictures. Pop culture postmodernism, represent!

THE GRAND BUDAPEST HOTEL — Night Train is more of a psychological thriller than an action ripper, but it ends with an exciting set-piece shoot out on a mountain-range crossing cable-car. Wes Anderson’s latest film has a couple of its characters in a similar transport prior to a crazy chase on skis.

Veteran (that is, old-ish) critic Glenn Kenny has written for oodles of publications and these days reviews‎ new releases at RogerEbert.com. He blogs at Some Came Running and tweets (mostly in jest) at @glenn__kenny.

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[Photos: Everett Collection]