Igenlode Wordsmith

Loved this -- probably one of the funniest Will Hay films I've seen. I far prefer the pictures he made with Charles Hawtrey to the 'classic' teaming with Moore/Marriott, and an excellent supporting cast here includes Peter Ustinov and Frank Pettingell (of "Gaslight" fame).

I always find Hay funnier when he is being a pompous but resourceful twit rather than simply an arrogant incompetent, and here his schoolmaster character is put up against the Nazis and manages (with assistance) to rise to the occasion... aided by the fact that his opponents half the time are even bigger buffoons than he is. A sharp script relies heavily on verbal humour, with two outstanding scenes that riff on the absurdities of the English language. The invasion plan sequence in which Hay improvises strategy wildly in a cascade of puns while attempting to pick a German general's pocket deserves to be a classic of the genre (take them from the flanks in Lancs to keep the Paras all tied up in Notts... but don't get caught with your Panzers down in the Severn Tunnel).( Read more... )

In Night Train to Munich, Charters and Caldicott illustrate perhaps the epitome of English humour at its own expense — as caricatures they could almost have stepped out of propaganda for the other side. We are intended to laugh at them, and we do. But they represent also all the dogged and prized eccentricity of the nation, a red rag in the face of Nazi efficiency and uniformity. They are insular and sport-obsessed, far more interested in their own affairs than in interfering with the rest of the world: but by jingo, if they do—!

As a comedy-thriller "Night Train to Munich" went down very well at the National Film Theatre, and I was very glad to have caught the final screening of the season after missing them all when it played here last year. I did feel that the comedy elements were ultimately more successful than the pure action sequences, though. Given the constraints of wartime filming it suffers understandably from an absence of location shooting and some rather obvious model-work, and the big battle at the finale is riddled with unintentionally comic clichés, such as the revolver that fires dozens of shots without reloading only to come up suddenly empty for dramatic convenience, the enemies who couldn't hit the proverbial barn-door with a rifle while the hero is unfailingly accurate with a hand-gun, and a crippling wound that is conveniently forgotten when it comes to mid-air acrobatics. The beginning of the film also features one of the most bizarre episodes of would-be brutality that I've ever encountered — presumably censored for audience sensibilities — where a concentration camp inmate is apparently being savagely beaten by a guard, but the sound effects attached suggest something more along the lines of a petulant tapping with a fly-whisk!

Watching Rex Harrison infiltrate Nazi Germany armed with nothing more than supreme impudence and a monocle, on the other hand, is pure unalloyed delight, as are his undercover scenes in England as he endeavours to hawk popular songs by means of persistent performance. His double-act with Margaret Lockwood as they portray the warring couple who inevitably end up united is both amusing and genuinely credible: the film admirably refrains from underlining the moment when she — and the audience — realise that she really does care for him. And, as always with actors originally recognised from performances in middle age, he comes across as amazingly young and debonair, and yet still unmistakably Rex Harrison — a slightly disorienting experience!

The real disorientation, however, comes from the casting of Paul Henreid in the rival role of Karl Marsen, the Nazi intelligence agent, a coup that becomes quite unintendedly effective from his subsequent Hollywood career featuring parts as romantic leads. Given that I'd last seen him as sensitive confidant of Bette Davis in "Now, Voyager", I instinctively assumed that his clean-cut Czech resister was to be the hero of the piece, and the role reversal took me as completely by surprise as could have been hoped for. But the character remains an oddly sympathetic one — indeed, the Germans in general are depicted as harassed human beings rather than monsters — and it is hard not to empathize with him as he watches his 'womanising' rival supposedly sweep the girl they both love off her feet. In the final scenes, as he lies wounded in the path of the returning cable car, I found myself frankly terrified on his behalf that the action clichés would culminate in Karl's death crushed beneath the cabin that has carried his rival to safety, and surprised and relieved when he was allowed — albeit bereft — to survive the battle.

"Night Train to Munich" is probably most effective when it is at its most flippant, whether at the English or German expense, and at its most formulaic where it tries to be 'serious'. But it has moments of genuine tension and feeling and is a fast-moving, entertaining picture. It's a long time since I saw "The Lady Vanishes" — of which this is often cited as a pale shadow — and the Hitchcock production doesn't seem to have left much impression on me over the intervening years; but I thoroughly enjoyed "Night Train to Munich", for all its flaws, and remain impressed by its sheer sangfroid as a wartime morale-raiser.

Unfortunately, the film itself was a bit of a disappointment. The novice Hitchcock is clearly in love with special effects and the manufacture of suspense, but he resorts to devices that are all too obviously manufactured in his endeavour to throw suspicion on the eponymous lodger. It's pretty difficult to poke a fire in such a way as to poise the poker threateningly above the head of the girl on the other side of the table, even if she is bending down to retrieve a lost chess-piece; and it's pretty crude to have your suspect pretend to stab the heroine with a table-knife. And when the murderer is known to have a fixation of blonde girls, it's not exactly subtle to have your suspect talk not about the beauty, but the colour of the heroine's hair — lack of subtlety is the main theme here, culminating in the lodger's 'crucifixion', when a trickle of blood oozes from his mouth in what is doubtless intended to be a deeply significant shot. The story is a potentially good one, but the execution is too often ham-handed... not aided, I'm afraid, by some poor acting.

It does annoy me when people dismiss bad acting in silents with airy phrases such as 'you had to overact to get the story across without dialogue' and 'that style of acting was normal in those days'; any decent silent-era actor can get his message across just by the way he moves and reacts without making eyes at the camera or gesturing around, and wooden acting is wooden acting in any era. Top silent actors were often better than talkie actors because they didn't have the crutch of dialogue to distract from awkward body language; if it looked unnatural, everyone would notice.

Ivor Novello had no pretensions to be a great screen actor — he was originally selected for film roles simply on the grounds of his striking good looks, and cheerfully admitted it — but this is far from being his best performance. He gives every indication of reacting to off-screen directions as to what expression to pull next, rather than communicating clearly with the audience; some scenes are far more successful than others. Malcolm Keen in the role of his rival Joe, the detective, is little better, and the mysterious "June" (perhaps a contemporary society celebrity with whom the audience was expected to be on first-name terms?) acts them both off the screen, as do the character actors who play her parents.

The film has good moments, generally when a touch of humour is allowed to break up the would-be intensity or when the actors relax enough to give more natural performances, but it left me feeling nakedly manipulated. There are flashes of talent, but all concerned are trying too obviously and too hard; I'm not sure I could honestly recommend it, save for curiosity's sake.