I haven’t written about a film for a while, but I enjoyed this one so much I really felt I had to. Night Train to Munich is an earlier film directed by Carol Reed, now most famous for The Third Man.
Rex Harrison plays a British agent who impersonates a German officer in order to exfiltrate a Czech engineer and his daughter from Nazi Germany at the very beginning of the second world war. His manner is very characteristically English: flippant on the surface and deadly serious underneath.
This 1940 film is best described as a comedy thriller. If you like the earlier sort of spy fiction, the chances are you will enjoy this, because it feels like a compendium of John Buchan, Eric Ambler and Sapper. Indeed, at one point our hero says “I’m not Bulldog Drummond, you know”. It’s also an example of that genre of films and novels set on long-distance trains that flourished in the 1930s.
One of the things that is striking about this film today is the strength of the anti-Nazi propaganda message. No opportunity to either ridicule or criticise the Nazi regime is missed. It’s depicted as a mixture of brutality and absurd bureaucracy. Early scenes take place in a concentration camp, at this stage depicted as a place for political prisoners. Even Mein Kampf is sent up: “They give a copy to bridal couples over here.” “I don’t think it’s that sort of book, old boy.” It’s almost shocking to hear Harrison, in his guise as a loyal Nazi, say that “England is controlled by the masons and the jew Churchill”.
An awful lot is packed into a suspenseful and brisk ninety minutes or so and the whole thing moves along at a cracking pace, with several clever plot twists, and one in particular that is a real surprise, even today.
I found myself thinking that this is like a Bond film before there were Bond films, and indeed, wondering if Ian Fleming saw it. The finale on the Swiss border will seem familiar to anyone who has seen Where Eagles Dare, so again, I wonder if Alistair Maclean saw the earlier film at some point.
The film has been considered as a sort of follow-up to the earlier and more famous The Lady Vanishes, also written by Frank Launder and Sidney Gilliat, the scriptwriters here. Despite the repeat appearance of the Charters and Caldicott characters and Margaret Lockwood, I think the resemblance is overstated. For a start, despite the title, far less of Night Train to Munich actually takes place on the train. Carol Reed’s directorial style is also quite different to Hitchcock’s, grittier and more realistic and this, as well as the urgency of the wartime situation, gives the film a very different atmosphere.
John Buchan wrote that thrillers should have “a story that marches just within the bounds of the possible” and that is very much the case here. If you fancy a bit of lockdown escapism, Night Train to Munich is available free on Amazon Prime.
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