Intrigue & Charm

Night Train to Munich 1940 U.K. Twentieth Century Fox; remastered Criterion Collection DVD released in 2010 (90 minutes). Directed by Carol Reed; written by Sidney Gilliat and Frank Launder; cinematography by Otto Kanturek; edited by R. E. Dearing.

Popular on both sides of the Atlantic in its day, Night Train to Munich, an early Carol Reed spy thriller, combines terrific writing, plotting and acting with romance and a circa-1940 bare-knuckle British lampoon of German Nazis.

Reed went on to direct The Fallen Idol (1948), The Third Man (1949), and Our Man in Havana (1959), notable among others. The writing team of Sidney Gilliat and Frank Launder also wrote Alfred Hitchcock’s The Lady Vanishes (1938), a spy thriller-romantic comedy which also involves intrigue on a train in fascist Central Europe but has a lot more moving parts.

Both Night Train to Munich and The Lady Vanishes feature Margaret Lockwood as the leading lady and the comedy duo Charters (Basil Radford) and Caldicott (Naunton Wayne) as British public school Old Boys who comment on their surroundings for the ‘right-thinking sort’ and are befuddled by ‘foreigners’. Both films were edited by R. E. Dearing, but The Lady Vanishes is visually superior, with Hitchcock’s German expressionist-style montage and technical attention to sets, back projections and model-making.

Reed’s film opens with a static model of Berchtesgaden, Adolf Hitler’s alpine retreat. The action is set in the six months between the Nazi occupation of Czechoslovakia in March 1939 and the September invasion of Poland which brought Great Britain into the war. An actor playing Hitler harangues a civilian official and slams his fist against the words ‘Austria’, ‘Sudetenland’ and

‘Prague’ on a succession of maps. These scenes blend with newsreel footage of Nazi armies advancing across Europe and a smiling Hitler. A high-pitched German harangue in the voice well-known to 1930s radio listeners comes from behind official high closed doors marked ‘AH’.

The scene switches to a high-tech Czech steel works. Metallurgist Axel Bomasch (James Harcourt) has invented a ‘revolutionary’ steel alloy for use in armor plate. The Nazis are approaching Prague. The company director, anxious to keep this technology out of German hands, provides Bomasch passports and airplane tickets to leave the country for England with his daughter Anna (Lockwood). Bomasch barely manages to board the last plane out; the Nazis nab Anna and put her in a concentration camp near Prague.

In the camp, Anna meets Karl Marsen (Paul Henreid), a thoughtful and attractive dissident schoolteacher who escapes with her to England. Henreid (billed here as von Hernried) at first wins Anna over playing a high-minded role, along the lines of his later famous Victor Laszlo in Casablanca (1942). But in this story his Marsen plays for the other side.

The concentration camp conveys a sense informed by experience; its oversized searchlights dramatize the atmosphere. The spy tradecraft also feels convincing, such as when a German operative meets his handler in a London doctor’s office. These details mean business in a way that makes it easier to suspend disbelief when a British operative turns up in a Nazi uniform at admiralty headquarters in Berlin and orders Germans around speaking with a German accent.  

Gus Bennett (Rex Harrison, in his first leading film role), a storefront boardwalk entertainer at a seaside resort in the south of England, helps Anna find her father. Bomasch is working with the British Admiralty on a project involving his steel alloy. But others are lurking. Before long, Bomasch and his daughter are on a U-boat back to Nazi Germany. Bennett, who turns out to be more than an entertainer who cannot sing, gets leave to rescue them.

Posing in Berlin as Major Ulrich Herzoff with a monocle that matches his accent and uniform, Bennett—later also identified by a chance British acquaintance (Charters) as ‘the Dicky Randall who played [cricket] for “The Gentlemen”’—must keep a step ahead of the Gestapo as he tries to spirit Bomasch and his daughter out of the country. This ‘spiriting out’ begins on a train to Munich the same September night Germany launches its invasion of Poland.

As in The Lady Vanishes, the protagonist is ably assisted on the train by the good offices of Charters and Caldicott. Charters grouses about leaving his custom golf clubs in Berlin, and he does not progress past ‘Hitler’s boyhood’ in the Mein Kampf he bought for the train ride because the Berlin newsstand did not offer Punch. But the lads recognize and rally to a good British chap in need of help, and find a practical application for Charters’ train reading.

The Nazis are focused on acquiring Bomasch’s alloy. Anna, already impressed that the talentless singer is actually a British naval intelligence officer, feigns a lack of romantic interest in him through flirtatious banter. Bennett has to get Anna and Bomasch across the Swiss border. And everyone has sport with the stereotypically dogged, regimented, authority-respecting, shouting Germans.

 

The Day of the MacGuffin

The Day of the Jackal 1973 UK/France (143 minutes) directed by Fred Zinnemann; screenplay by Kenneth Ross, based on Frederick Forsythe’s 1971 novel of the same title.

The Day of the Jackal is a taut political thriller in short declarative sentences.

This fast-paced 1973 Fred Zinnemann film derives from a bestselling thriller by British journalist Frederick Forsythe. It is shot in a semi-documentary style on location in Paris. It follows one of several plots by a right-wing French Army faction to assassinate President Charles de Gaulle in the early 1960s.

The army faction called itself the Organisation armée secrète (OAS). The OAS believed that de Gaulle, the national hero of the Second World War, had betrayed the army by ‘giving in’ to Algerian demands for independence after the country passed a referendum for self-determination in January 1961. Still sore from its loss in Vietnam, the army had been fighting a bitter counterinsurgency war in Algeria since 1954 to keep Algeria French. The OAS were serious, highly-trained professionals on a mission.

The point is not whether plot succeeds: de Gaulle died of old age in 1970. The drama centers on Police Inspector Claude Lebel (Michael Lonsdale), the Paris policeman tasked from on high to catch the assassin known by his codename ‘Chacal’ (Edward Fox), believed to be days away from an assassination attempt on the French president. The casting choices could not have been better. Lebel, aided by his assistant Caron (Derek Jacobi), is a gruff, down-to-earth city police detective, middle-aged and matter-of-fact in contrast to higher-level government officials—a French cop to the fingertips. Chacal, the French for ‘jackal’, supposedly a British ex-military contract killer, is all business, despite his slight build, ascots and breezy manner.

The casting, locations and seamless use of actual footage give this story a documentary-like feel, from the tall, distinguished elderly man (Adrien Cayla-Legrand) seen only at a distance, whose frame (de Gaulle was 6 feet, 5 inches, or 196cm tall) and large nose give him the famous de Gaulle profile, to the National Archives’ Hôtel Soubise standing in as the Élysée Palace, complete with a line of official black Citroën DSes. 

The opening scene reenacts a 1962 assassination attempt on de Gaulle. A team of ex-paratroopers led by Jean-Marie Bastien-Thiry (Jean Sorel) tries to kill de Gaulle in a roadside ambush in the southwest Paris suburb of Le Petit-Clamart. Using automatic weapons, the team practically shoots the president’s profile in the rear of a black Citroën DS—140 shots fired in seven seconds, we are told—but miss both Le President and his wife. Bastien-Thiry was captured and executed.

The OAS then interviews and selects Charles Harold Calthrop (Fox), from their short list. We are told that Calthrop, ‘a commercial representative for a small armaments firm,’ successfully assassinated General Rafael Trujillo, dictator of the Dominican Republic, in 1961 (this happened but evidently was a local affair), as well as a political figure in the Congo (Prime Minister Patrice Lumumba was murdered in the newly-independent Congo's Katanga Province in early 1961). Colonel Rodin (Eric Porter) agrees to pay Calthrop the $500,000 he demands to do the job: half in advance, half on fulfillment. Calthorp tells these men to refer to him as ‘Chacal’. He gives them a contact number through which to route messages.

 

 ‘I’d like to know how you expect us to find half a million dollars so quickly?’ asks one of the conspirators.

‘Use your network. Rob some banks,’ Calthrop replies.

We see Calthrop select the name ‘Paul Oliver Duggan’ from an infant’s grave in a rural English parish church graveyard. Calthrop takes this name to obtain a passport to travel to Genoa to set up the job by acquiring a specially-designed sniper’s rifle and more false documents, and then to scout the site in Paris. Calthrop also boosts the passport of a Danish man of his size and build at a British airport.

The MacGuffin—a spurious narrative detail which sidetracks the viewer’s attention rather than serve as the plot point it purports to be—is the detailed length to which Calthrop goes to hide his identity. He gives himself the codename ‘Chacal’ which, a British Foreign Office official later points out, combines the first three letters respectively of Charles and Calthrop. But he could be anyone. Apart from images on various identification documents, 'Chacal' is a cipher. He also is a polished professional, whether as Calthrop, Chacal, Duggan, ‘a fair-haired young foreigner with two suitcases,’ Per Lundquist the gay Danish schoolteacher, or André Martin the one-legged French war veteran.

We watch as Chacal leads Lebel on a chase across France shedding identities and leaving bodies. We know that Chacal does not kill de Gaulle. But we do not know whether this is because something happens to Chacal or his mission, or because Lebel foils the plot within the few days, hours, or even moments before one of de Gaulle’s three public appearances on Liberation Day on 25 August 1963.