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.