Night Train to Munich

Carol Reed and David Lean were contemporaries, and hit their stride in the immediate postwar years, when British cinema came roaring back from austerity.  Lean was the more celebrated, later, with Lawrence and Zhivago, but for a time, they were neck and neck.  Lean came out with Brief Encounter in 1945, Great Expectations in 1946, and Oliver Twist in 1948.  Reed released Odd Man Out in ‘47, The Fallen Idol in ‘48, and The Third Man in ‘49.  Reed had directed a dozen pictures before the war, while Lean was still making his bones as an editor.  Reed shot Night Train to Munich in 1939, and it was released in 1940. 

They were uncertain times in Britain, as elsewhere.  The movie covers six months, from March to September, 1939, from the German military occupation of Czechoslovakia, to the Polish invasion and the UK declaring war.  The tensions of the picture hinge on that time-frame. 

Night Train has an unconventional structure.  There’s essentially a prologue, the attempted escape from Prague, the break-out from the prison camp, the brush contact with British naval intelligence.  Rex Harrison doesn’t show up until twenty minutes into the movie.  And the clock runs out on the first act with Paul Henreid standing on the conning tower of the sub.  The second act picks up with Harrison doubling back on the Germans, lasts another twenty minutes, and the third begins with Charters and Caldicott reading Mein Kampf and runs to the end of the picture, a breathtaking forty-five minutes.  You don’t notice, because the hour-and-a-half runtime is so tight. 

The screenplay was by Sidney Gilliat and Frank Launder, who wrote The Lady Vanishes, among many others - more on this, below.  According to Gilliat, the source material, a Gordon Wellesley short story, accounted for the first ten minutes of the script, and he and Launder winged the rest.  The inconsistencies and plot holes are paved over with snappy dialogue and terrific pacing.  They never give you pause to reflect. 

Margaret Lockwood made The Lady Vanishes for Hitchcock in 1938, and The Stars Look Down for Carol Reed in 1940, both co-starring Michael Redgrave.  But when Redgrave wasn’t available for Night Train to Munich, they decided on Rex Harrison.  Harrison wasn’t box office; Lockwood was a much bigger name.  But it’s a career-making performance.  Lockwood later told an interviewer, Rex loved getting up in that Nazi military drag, the shiny cavalry boots and the monocle, coming to attention, clicking his heels – and you can see it, his relish in shifting gears, from the clownish and languid Dickie Randall/Gus Bennett to the punctilious and condescending Major Ulrich Herzog, of the Army Corps of Engineers.  He’s barely restrained from licking his lips. 

Paul Henreid is Harrison’s foil, as the SS officer, first an infiltrator in the prison camp, then undercover in Britain, and lastly back in uniform, in Germany.  It was a big part for Henreid (then credited as Paul von Hernried, his billing before he fled Nazi-annexed Austria), although he’d had a substantial supporting role in Goodbye, Mr. Chips the year before.  You might even wonder if Henreid is lined up to be the hero, after he springs Lockwood from a detention camp and smuggles her into England, but not after the spectacular switcheroo in the optometrist’s office.  Henreid’s character is possessive of Lockwood, and he’s a play of light and shadow, his conflicted feelings a flicker behind his eyes.  It gives him greater depth, almost as showy a part as Harrison’s.  His personal suspicions make him second-guess his professional ones.  The final shot of Henreid, left behind to bind his wounds as the cable car reaches safety, is ambiguous, and you’re almost sympathetic with his loss.  He might have given it all up for love. 

And then, Margaret Lockwood.  She was a pretty big draw, beginning in the late 1930’s, but her movie career tanked in the mid-1950’s, which makes no more sense to me than why some people won’t eat potatoes.  Those enormous, luminous eyes, just to begin with.  She got a name playing bad girls in period pictures, some of them re-shot for the American market because too much cleavage showed in Regency costume.  She was twenty-two when she made The Lady Vanishes, and there was talk of teaming her with Michael Redgrave in imitation of William Powell and Myrna Loy in the Thin Man series.  She has an immediacy that seems unrehearsed, and a liveliness, an appetite.  It feels completely genuine. 

Night Train to Munich is sometimes said to be a sequel to The Lady Vanishes, or a variation, but they bear only a slight family resemblance.  The same scriptwriters, a train trip, and, of course, Charters and Caldicott.  The element of madness, the gaslighting, is missing entirely.  And once past the intro, the crowded mountain inn where Iris and Gilbert meet cute, all the action in The Lady Vanishes takes place on the train, which gives it a cramped, claustrophobic quality, a physical trap, for characters trapped by circumstance.  A very Hitchcock device.  Night Train to Munich has its share of the artificial, but no metaphor so literal.  In the Hitchcock, Charters and Caldicott stand in for the audience, skeptical but willing to suspend belief; in Night Train, their function is less whimsical and more dramatically urgent, although they still get in some stiff upper lip zingers.

CHARTERS    Bought a copy of Mein Kampf.  Occurs to me it might shed a spot of light on all this how d’ye do.  [Pages through book]  Ever read it?

CALDICOTT   Never had the time.

CHARTERS    I understand they give a copy to all the bridal couples over here.

CALDICOTT   I don’t think it’s that sort of book, old man. 

Basil Radford and Naunton Wayne, who played Charters and Caldicott, went on to play them in a couple of more pictures, and on radio (with Gilliat and Launder scripting, again).  They’re pompous, dense, and endearing. 

The Lady Vanishes is a fantastic movie, one of the best early Hitchcocks, and a box of marvels to unwrap.  You can watch it over and over, and still be charmed every time.  Night Train to Munich is overshadowed by the movies Carol Reed directed just after the war, and because it’s seen as derivative of Lady.  I don’t agree, as I’ve tried to make clear.  You can find it on YouTube, in a very decent print, but for truly crisp and lustrous, get the Criterion DVD.