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Home , Margaret Lockwood, Night Train to Munich

Classic or Cricket?

Night Train to Munich (1940), Directed by

By Fearless Young Orphan

We’ve almost got a classic spy thriller on our hands with this entry, and the only reason I say “almost” is because of a certain lightweight comedy element that the movie injects in its final third, which throws off the thrills in exchange for a few laughs.

The first hour is great stuff. The film is set in Europe of 1939, and frankly acknowledges a power-mad Hitler running amok, taking over the world piece by piece. In Prague, scientist Dr. Axel Bomasch is hastily smuggled to Great Britain, lest his research into a valuable new steel alloy fall into the hands of the Nazis. And the Nazis want Bomasch, bad. The old man just barely escapes on the day of

invasion; not so lucky is his daughter Anna (charming ), who is arrested and put in a concentration camp.

While imprisoned, Anna befriends another prisoner, Karl Marsen (Paul Hernreid) who tells her of his plans to escape. He knows one of the guards “from before the war,” and thinks the young man will aid their flight. Sure enough, they are able to squeak through a hole in the fence one night when the lights mysteriously go out, and soon Karl and Anna are on a boat to England to meet up with her father.

It’s a nasty shock when we discover that Marsen is actually working for the Nazis. He’s an undercover agent who was purposely put in Anna’s orbit so her father could be located and, ahem, “invited” back to Germany. Still unaware that she has been duped, Anna follows a lead to her father’s location and finds him under the care of a British agent, Gus Bennett (, amazingly young).

Gus Bennett does not impress Anna much, but those devil-may-care British agents never do seem very serious at first, do they? Gus barely seems to understand what is at stake, but of course we know (because we’ve seen enough movies) that he’s actually a crackerjack agent with a lot of tricks up his sleeve. I mean, sure he is, even though he makes a rather careless mistake and loses the Bomasches again . . . oops, they are kidnapped back to the Gestapo headquarters, where Anna’s life is threatened if Dr. Bomasch does not agree to work for the Nazis.

Meanwhile, Gus decides he will go undercover himself to retrieve his lost charges, and adopts the Dr. Doolittle and/or Professor Henry Higgins masquerades identity of a Nazi Major, as a Nazi? Ouch, my daddy-issue fantasies hurt . . . strutting into the middle

of Gestapo headquarters with fake letters, fake orders, and nothing but his own damn ego to protect him. He convinces everyone, Marsen included (for Marsen never saw Gus, an important point) that he knows the Bomasches from Prague and that he can a) seduce the daughter and b) convince the father to cooperate. Of course, Anna and Dr. Bomasch recognize Gus and know that there is yet hope.

This is all quite exciting. Rex Harrison is utterly winning as Gus; Margaret Lockwood is a brave, tough woman who means to protect her father. Thank god her character is not weighed down with the “virgin” morality of the time – meaning that she can fake her own seduction by Gus without fainting at the idea of her reputation being besmirched. Oh, and is she really faking it? Heh. That’s a good question.

The rescue leads to the risky journey on the “” of the title, on which Gus means to switch cars and lead his charges to the safety of Switzerland. Unfortunately, but naturally, Marsen and the Gestapo will discover the truth about Gus’s identity before that, so their escape will be all the more complicated.

Now comes the problematic “comic relief” which ordinarily wouldn’t be problematic except that it is landing right in the midst of a very exciting plot that already has by far enough entertainment value to keep us riveted. And not only is it an unnecessary comic relief, it is a puzzling one unless you understand the background. So I’m going to fill you in.

Alfred Hitchcock’s famous thriller (which also starred Lockwood) featured a pair of traveling Englishmen, Charters and Caldicott, avid cricket fans who provided some comic banter. This pair was apparently quite a success with the film’s audiences, because the pair, same actors and all, return in this film in the same capacity. In fact, the film Night Train to Munich is referred to as a sort of unofficial “sequel” to The Lady Vanishes although the term “spin-off” is more appropriate. These two traveling Englishmen find themselves embroiled in the espionage by the fact that they are on the same Munich-bound train and one of them recognizes Gus from school. As I was, you might find yourself confused by their sudden takeover of the plot; it honestly seems as if Gus and

Anna are practically abandoned as the movie joins Charters and Caldicott in their struggles with this “bloody inconvenient” Nazi state. Eventually, of course, Charters and Caldicott are so incensed by Nazi rudeness that they join in the fight and aid the escape of Gus and the Bomasches.

Well, I’m sure that’s very pleasing to the audience, if that audience is living in 1940, but here in 2013 it’s a strange juxtaposition. We switch from a tension- filled deep cover mission with Gus to a witty-bantered, coincidence-dependant comic adventure in which the incredibly resourceful Gus must be rescued by a pair of cricket fans from London. Huh. While it doesn’t ruin the film, it does effectively suck away a lot of the momentum. Some of this momentum is regained in the final act, when the entire party must escape across the Swiss border by means of a mountaintop cable car, and even though special effects weren’t then what they are now, this interlude is reminiscent of the many sky- high finales Hitchcock enjoyed.

So by all means, see this one if you enjoy these early-days spy flicks, with that certain Hitchcockian feel. Netflix has it for streaming and it’s a 90-minute adventure that will send you off to bed with a smile on your face. For my opinion, I’d say it just misses being a classic, or maybe it is more like a classic that is interrupted unexpectedly by a cricket game.