Night Train to Munich - 1940

Night Train to Munich (1940) is an astonishingly lighthearted escaping-the-Nazis caper with disarming wit and considerable humor, yet it is not parody.  For the British film industry to produce such a flippant combination of suspense over the characters’ dangerous predicament, and yet mockery of the enemy, during the early months of World War II is a tribute to that nation’s superb dry wit as a shield against misfortune.

The movie is based partly on a 1939 short story, but director Carol Reed cobbled together a menagerie of spy thriller aspects and English music hall sensibilities to create a movie that would likely not have been produced in Hollywood.  Not that we didn’t have our share of both thrillers and mockery of the enemy in those days, but American emotions always seem to tend to taking a clear stance and never budging, which we seem to regard as a virtue; whereas the English, or perhaps European, notion is to shrug the shoulders, poke a swift jab, and break off when the dustup becomes boring, no longer serving a purpose, or it’s time for tea.  At that point, the enemy becomes not a threat, but a bore.

Certainly, the movie, being filmed during that “is that all there is?” period of the war known jokingly as the Sitzkrieg, a play on the word Blitzkrieg, which is the horror that was being done to Poland while the U.K. and France and western Europe waited for months for the enemy to strike westward, and so emotions in Great Britain might not have been as riled up as they would be, for instance, when the movie was finally released on July 26, 1940.  The Battle of Britain, when the island was fighting for its life under constant bombing and expecting invasion any minute, began two weeks earlier on July 10^th and would continue through October.  One imagines by that time there must have been less superior chortling and more nail biting in the theater.

The storyline of the film begins much earlier, before the war, just after the Nazis have marched into Czechoslovakia in March 1939.  We begin with what will be a series of wonderful models (I love the use of models for scenery in that era) of the mountain retreat where Hitler slams his fist on a map of the Sudetenland with lots of bellowing.  We see actual newsreel footage of the Anschluss, and then cut to plot exposition.  James Harcourt plays an inventor working on a special formula for armored metal plating, which will be invaluable in what may be the coming war.  He is urged to leave Czechoslovakia at once to avoid capture of himself and his formula by the Nazis.

He waits anxiously at the airport, the plane ready to take off, but his daughter, who was to leave with him, has not arrived.  She is Margaret Lockwood, and she is detained by the Nazis and sent to a concentration camp.  Her scientist father escapes to Great Britain.

In the concentration camp, whispering through a barbed-wire fence, she makes an alliance with fellow inmate Paul Henreid, who we first see boldly mouthing off to the authorities and taken away to be beaten for his defiance.  He arranges escape with Miss Lockwood, making contact with one of the guards who was a former student of his.

Soon they are on a small launch to England and arrive safely, though they must be careful about trying to locate her father because neither of them has a passport or permission to enter the country.  It is not wartime yet, and they would not be considered refugees (though one would think being chucked into a concentration camp would make them qualify for refugee status).  They go for help to an eye doctor friend of Henreid’s already established in England, and when Henreid is alone with him, he asks for an exam and is told to read the eye chart.

Great macular degeneration!  The eye chart is written in code!  Henreid and the doctor give each other the Nazi salute!  Henreid is a bad guy!  The “escape” was planned.

But he’s not the mastermind.  He’s “just following orders” as their saying goes, and he is told to keep close tabs on Margaret Lockwood, expecting she will eventually find her father and lead them to him so they can drag him back to Germany.

Lockwood, after having placed an ad in a newspaper, is contacted and told to look for Gus Bennet in a seaside town.  Gus Bennet turns out to be a cheesy music hall performer pushing sheet music sales by singing cheery prattle, complete with straw boater, the most popular headgear of entertainers and flam-flam artists.

Gus is played by Rex Harrison, singing with gusto and an unrepentant blasé attitude.  He is silly, flighty, but he reunites her with her father, who is now working for the British government.  Gasp!  Rex is a secret agent working for the government!  He doesn’t seem the type, but apparently singing ditties is his unusual cover.  However, he when he takes off the straw boater, there still isn’t a serious bone in his body.  His personality doesn’t change at all, which is an intriguing wrinkle.  He seems slightly bored with everything.

But he’s not the luckiest or perhaps most thorough agent.  The scientist and his daughter, thanks to Henreid’s watchfulness, are captured again and taken to Berlin.  Rex suggests that he be the one to go to Berlin to bring them back, as he had spent some years there and is familiar with the city.  We next see Rex in a German uniform pretending to be an officer staying in the same hotel (now used as Nazi headquarters) as Margaret Lockwood, her father, and their captors.  His personality is still the same, still offering glib comments faintly washed with thin coat of pretended innocence.  Catch the elaborate, “This is a fine country to live in,” sequence.  This is all a lark to him, especially his machinations to get to Margaret.  He tells the Nazi authorities that she is an old lover of his and is still carrying a torch for him.  He offers to romance her for the sake of the Fatherland and her father’s secrets.  Getting an adjoining room, he explains his plan to her.  Up until now, he has thoroughly irritated and disgusted her, but she is willing to play along to save her father.

Rex remarks, “If you could find me unbelievably attractive, so much the better.”

She responds with deadpan seriousness, “All right, I’ll try.”

He arranges that they should be caught together in her room, to give the Nazis assurance his plan is working.  Such a playful, open suggestion of unmarried sex is not usually found in American films, and it’s a hoot.

We finally get to the train part, to Munich, at night, and there he continues his cheeky and irreverent treatment of the Nazi guards as irrelevant, while Margaret plays along, doggedly pretending to be in madly love with him.  The biggest danger appears in the form of two middle-aged British tourists, who blow Rex’s cover by one of them recognizing him as an old school chum.  They are Charters and Caldicott, played respectively by Basil Radford and Naunton Wayne.  They move about with the quick prattle but the mental fog of music hall comedians, but in the end, they reason it best to help Rex with his problem of shaking the Nazis off his tail.  King and country and all that, you know.

They’d better hurry.  It’s now September 1939 and war is being declared.

A climax suddenly becomes fierce as Henreid chases them to a mountain lodge where their only escape to Switzerland is by suspended tram over a deep snowy chasm, Henreid shooting at them until the very last moments.

As is usually noted in discussions of this film, the characters of Charters and Caldicot, played by the same actors, first appear in The Lady Vanishes (1938) directed by Alfred Hitchcock, that also has some other similar elements to this film.  The duo would appear as the same characters in a few other films as well, which is quite a novelty for supporting players in minor roles.  I like to think Charters and Caldicot are still out there somewhere, and we might run into them someday.

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Jacqueline T. Lynch is the author of Ann Blyth: Actress. Singer. Star. and Movies in Our Time - Hollywood Mirrors and Mimics the Twentieth Century and Hollywood Fights Fascism and Christmas in Classic Films. TO JOIN HER READERS' GROUP - follow this link for a free book as a thank-you for joining.