StunnaKrypto Self-important, over-dramatic, uninspired.

Exoticalot People are voting emotionally.

Contentar Best movie of this year hands down!

MoPoshy Absolutely brilliant

secondtake Berlin Express (1948)Just after WWII has ended comes this film about getting inside the post-Nazi world for an assassination. It's multi-national and filled with bitter scenes of German ruin.This actually is an amazing film, starting off (and ending) as beautiful and dramatic. And it's complex but luckily edited with precision. It's filmed with remarkable realism in post-war German (Frankfurt and Berlin), with trains and train stations and lots of darkness and steam and drama. (Later there are huge areas of utter utter devastation.) The first half hour has a stunning film-noir style, lots of angles, deep shadows, moving camera, and so on, all under the hand of master cinematographer Lucien Ballard. It's great to just watch.It's also a rare imperfect glimpse of what it might actually be like in that era where Germany was an occupied territory. It's almost shocking, even now, or maybe especially now since we have seldom seen anything remotely this vast and awful in a long time. That really is the depth of the movie that was intended and effective.The plot (trying to save a German diplomat who is out for a peaceful future) you might call a device, and it is the weakness of it all, even though they place much of the best of it on a train where the drama is classic train stuff, car to car. There is also a lot of narration, explaining (rather well, but still having to explain) what is going on. Robert Ryan plays the leading man, an American agriculture expert out to help recovery in Europe. There is also the expected stereotyping—the casual smart American, the principled and arrogant Soviet, the suspicious and duplicitous Germans, the interested but somewhat victimized French, and the humorous and unflappable Brit. I'm serious—it's here, and it's done well enough you can easily buy into it. Merle Oberon is restrained but wonderful.Director Jacques Tourneau is always interesting and often compromised ("Out of the Past" is interesting and very uncompromised, for sure.) This movie has so many shifts and complications it is hard to know what they all mean, and this makes it all the more interesting, even as the narration deadens our absorption into events. I admit to liking every minute of it, even the bureaucratic office scenes (which had their own slight believability). By the end, as they all say goodbye and drive in separate directions, the truth of divided Germany was clear—even in 1948.The very last scene shows a man with one leg and crutches moving through some partly destroyed columns—very symbolic and right on.

nickrogers1969 I was looking forward to this movie. It seemed promising and I had hoped for a "The Lady Vanishes" type of mystery thriller. Jacques Tourneur directed the film - the man behind "Cat People", "I Walked with a Zombie" and "Out of the Past" - all excellent films that I love."Berlin Express" was sadly disappointing to see. The film is for the most of the time not set on a train and was not very exciting at all. Only the sequence in the brewery was ingeniously filmed. The rest of the film was all talk!!!The cast was not the most memorable and Merle Oberon seemed miscast. But the real star of the film is the photography of the ruins of Frankfurt and Berlin which is fascinating to see. See the film for that alone because the film is short on suspense. The plot was tedious relying very much on coincidence and I never cared for the characters.

JohnWelles "Berlin Express" (1948) is directed by Jacques Tourneur, who not only made the classic horror films "Cat People" (1942) and "I Walk with a Zombie" (1943), amongst others, under Val Lewton, he made the absolutely unbeatable film noir "Out of the Past" (1947). This semi-noir, his next after "Out of the Past", is nowhere as near as good, although it has its points of interest. It stars Robert Ryan, always good value, along with Merle Oberon and Paul Lukas.The screenplay was written by Curt Siodmak (an intriguing, if patchy, director in his own right) and Harold Medford and concerns a multinational group of train passengers (American, French, English and Russian) who become involved in a post-World War II Nazi assassination plot of a prominent peace activist.The photography by Lucien Ballard is very good and its trump card: the movie was shot on location in Berlin and Frankfurt-am-Main, so this is real post-war devastation you're seeing. In this, and a few other aspects (like Robert Ryan's character) this resembles the far superior "The Third Man" (1949). The main problem here is the script: it relies way too much on voice over narration to propel the film along and all the characters are stereotypes unimaginatively worked out. The direction is very stylish however, which makes the plot deficiencies somewhat more forgivable, even if Tourneur appears to be rather bored with plot mechanics. The acting isn't bad, but there isn't any great demands made on the cast and the standard is no better or worse than any other average Hollywood product of that period.So, no masterpiece, and in many respects, desperately so-so, but noir buffs, you won't need much prompting to take the plunge and watch it.

ShootingShark In the aftermath of World War II, American, British and Russian forces are vying for political control of Germany. When a German academic with a plan for unification is due to address a conference, there are some elements who do not wish him to attend …This film is a bit of a curio, a sort of uneasy mix of documentary and narrative thriller. It feels a little like Murder On The Orient Express as we try to figure out who's after Dr Bernhardt, but it's really much more about the mistrust and opportunism which existed in Germany in the late forties. There are amazing shots of bombed-out Frankfurt and Berlin literally blown to rubble, everywhere are people hawking what few possessions they have in order to get by, and the only real currency is cigarettes. The British-American alliance is uneasy, neither trust the Russians and all are worried about a German resurgence; none can bury the past, or agree on the future. It's perceptive, thought-provoking stuff, and it accurately foresees not only the Communist annexing of the fifties, but also the unification of the nineties. It was made by a terrific cosmopolitan group - a gifted French/American director, a great German writer (Curt Siodmak, who, along with his brother Robert, made some of the best films of the forties) and a fine international cast. The plethora of nations is amusingly summed up at the start when all the men hit on Oberon and she fobs them all off in different languages. The thriller elements of the plot don't always work so well but the characters are rich and intriguing, and whilst the extensive narration is off-putting it's there for a purpose. A small but profound anti-war film, made at a pivotal moment in military history when politicians were only concerned with their spoils.