SoftInloveRox Horrible, fascist and poorly acted

SpunkySelfTwitter It’s an especially fun movie from a director and cast who are clearly having a good time allowing themselves to let loose.

Ginger Very good movie overall, highly recommended. Most of the negative reviews don't have any merit and are all pollitically based. Give this movie a chance at least, and it might give you a different perspective.

Cassandra Story: It's very simple but honestly that is fine.

leethomas-11621 Be warned: The night train doesn't appear until an hour in! Naughton Wayne as cricket-loving Caldicott and Basil Radford as golf-playing Charters steal the movie! Shame fake outdoor sets give the film an amateurish air (but it was wartime). (viewed 10/16)

dglink Carol Reed's 1940 thriller "Night Train to Munich" bears more than a passing resemblance to Hitchcock's "The Lady Vanishes" of two years earlier. The two films share a star, Margaret Lockwood; crucial scenes aboard trains in Central Europe during the pre-World War II era; and the use of obvious miniatures. However, the most amusing carry-overs from the Hitchcock film are the characters of Charters and Caldicott, two English travelers who evidently have been touring the continent since 1938. The quintessential Englishmen, embodied by Basil Radford and Naunton Wayne, are always miffed by the inconveniences of travel, bumble into the action at critical moments, and are seemingly more pre-occupied by cricket scores and the whereabouts of golf clubs than European politics on the brink of a world conflict.Unfortunately, the script by Sidney Gilliat, from a story by Gordon Wellesley, does not focus on Charters and Caldicott, but rather on Lockwood and her attempts to get out of Prague to rejoin her inventor father in England, where he has found asylum from the Nazis. Although relatively short, the film has credibility problems, and action often jumps forward inexplicably, leaving gaping holes of exposition missing. Rex Harrison and Paul Henreid star alongside Lockwood; although Harrison was once referred to as "sexy Rexy," Henreid has more appeal, even in this pre-Casablanca pre-Now Voyager role. Evidently made as anti-Nazi propaganda, the film lacks tension, feels light, and borders on unintentional comedy, as when the incompetent Gestapo is easily fooled. Of course, everyone speaks English, and Harrison outwits the Nazis and passes for a German officer, because he once lived in Germany. A simplistic film that requires huge leaps in logic, "Night Train to Munich" is saved only by the talents of Lockwood, Harrison, and Henreid, and, of course, by the welcome return of Charters and Caldicott.

evanston_dad Carol Reed displays his ability to combine the elements of a superb thriller with the droll comedy of the English drawing room in this espionage suspense film set during WWII.Rex Harrison shines as a Brit disguising himself as a Nazi officer so he can infiltrate German headquarters and make off with a scientist and his daughter being held captive. The film culminates in a nail-biting finale set on the German/Swiss border.Bland Margaret Lockwood plays the heroine, but it doesn't much matter that she's pretty much a drip, because Harrison is the one you want to watch anyway. Paul Henreid equips himself well as an evil German.Aside from Harrison, the highlight of the film are the incidental characters played by Basil Radford and Naunton Wayne, who play two uninvolved British civilians who are persuaded to help Harrison's team outwit the Nazis and who react exactly the same to Nazis shooting at them as they do Nazis stealing their seats on the train. These two actors were paired up and used in a very similar way in Alfred Hitchcock's film from a few years prior, "The Lady Vanishes." Though its year of release here is listed as 1940, "Night Train to Munich" was nominated for a 1941 Academy Award in the category of Best Original Story (Gordon Wellesley), an award it lost to Harry Segall for "Here Comes Mr. Jordan." Grade: A

Igenlode Wordsmith 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.