One of my all time favorites.

Fantastic!

Although it has its amusing moments, in eneral the plot does not convince.

While it doesn't offer any answers, it both thrills and makes you think.

My favourite war movie, 36 Hours is a taut and engrossing thriller. I first saw at the time it was released and never forgot the memorable story line, although it took me more than 4 decades to track it down again. It trades heavily on the viewer's buy-in regarding the importance of the success of D-Day in saving the free world. It's funny that although we're all well aware that the D-Day landings succeeded we can't help being genuinely fearful while viewing the film about the Germans getting the details in advance, and that keeps us on the edge of or seats. Other critics feel the suspense lapses when the jig is initially up with hero, but I beg to differ. At that stage other elements are introduced. Our sympathy with the heroine Anna is developed by learning more about her, and similarly the character of the German doctor Walter Gerber becomes more interesting as his tense relationship with the Nazi side deteriorates.It truly ain't over til it's over in this film with the humour introduced by the unpredictable John Banner character. Finally, my favourite bit of all is at the end of the film. It's subtle and full of sentiment without being in the least sentimental. Well done! I'd rank 36 Hours an 8/10 overall. The missing points are because of the lack of any attempt to provide costumes and hairstyles in period, and because I feel the lovely Rod Taylor is miscast in the role of the doctor.

Saddled with an over-verbose script and mollycoddlingly dreary dialogue direction, this overtly promising spy melodrama turns out to be only intermittently exciting. It could have been considerably improved by really ruthless cutting. 115 minutes is too long to sustain suspense unless something really exciting is happening on-screen all the time. Here, all the unnecessary and often phony explanations could be judiciously cut to the bone. Another problem is that Rod Taylor is definitely not a convincing German – even with a dubbed voice to help him out. What's worse is that I didn't find either James Garner or Eva Marie Saint at all charismatic. Their verbose, over-padded dialogue merely serves as an excuse for one monotonous close-up after another. In fact, although lensed for the cinema wide screen, director George Seaton seems to have placed TV sales far more firmly in his mind. I believe this picture holds the record for the number of close-ups in an anamorphic movie. Widescreen framing is only used once or twice in the entire production. The rest of the slates are simply filled out with empty background space. Fortunately, production values are otherwise up to standard, and the climactic escape has its moments of suspense and genuine excitement (plus some human relief contributed by John Banner as a practical Home Guardsman). Of the other players, only Werner Peters, who contributes an effective characterization as the chief villain, deserves mention.

George Seaton was a Hollywood A-level writer and director who could tell a story efficiently and professionally. He also knew movies had to sell tickets to be successful. He kept that in mind while creating, often with William Perlberg as producer, movies that were satisfyingly A caliber and watchable, even when they were serious by Hollywood standards. He didn't mind threading in irony or even a message or two, but usually these were plot driven. Seaton, in other words, knew his way around. And so we have 36 Hours. It's not about the terrible conflicts of wartime exigencies as The Counterfeit Traitor is. It's not a sad, uncomfortable story of love and sacrifice that The Country Girl is. And it's certainly not a bit of romantic fluff as Teacher's Pet is. 36 Hours is a fine, efficient, wartime yarn, nothing more, nothing less...and that, for me, is good enough. Major Jefferson Pike (James Garner) is an Allied intelligence officer who has been flying between London and Lisbon to pick up information from a clerk in the German embassy. It's May 31, 1944. Pike is ordered to make one more flight...and the success of the Allied invasion only days away may hang in the balance. Hitler is convinced the invasion will take place in the Pas de Calais region. The Allies are doing everything possible to the keep the real location at Normandy from leaking out. The Germans, of course, are doing every thing they can to either confirm Pas de Calais or learn the real location. German agents, with Pike now in Lisbon, slip him a mickey. When he wakes up he's in a U. S. Army hospital in Germany. It's May 15, 1950. His American doctor (Rod Taylor) tells him he's been in a coma for six years. Germany lost and the Allies occupy the country. Wilkie is President. Former president Roosevelt is recuperating again at Warm Springs, Georgia. G.I. patients greet Pike by name. U. S. doctors aid his recovery. And now that the war is won, there's no secret about where in France the Allies actually invaded six years earlier. So tell us about it, they ask Pike. Pike's doctor, of course, is a German. Major Walter Gerber (Rod Taylor) is a skilled psychologist. The "U. S. military hospital" is a phony, a carefully prepared installation near the Swiss border where everyone -- patients, doctors, nurses -- are Germans carefully selected for their flawless English. And speaking of nurses, Pike's nurse, Anna Hedler (Eva Marie Saint), is introduced as his wife. Gerber has organized all this in a life-or-death gamble. He must convince Pike -- within 36 hours -- to volunteer the location of the invasion of France. Gerber, however, has someone watching over his shoulder. Otto Schack, a Gestapo interrogator, is equally convinced the experiment will fail. He is pressing to use the proved methods of Gestapo interrogation. All this makes for an intriguing and clever, if unlikely, con. But it works. We sure outfoxed the Germans with Normandy, Pike says, and gives the details with pride. But then Pike notices a small paper cut on his hand which is barely healed...a paper cut he now remembers getting two days ago in London. He realizes what must be happening. The con game now becomes a deadly cat and mouse game. Somehow he must convince Gerber and Schack that he knew what was going on all along and had conned them into thinking he had deliberately misled them away from the Pas de Calais. The last third of the movie -- now with the Germans conned thanks in part to lousy weather on June 5 -- becomes a race for Pike to save his skin. Can Pike escape and make it across the border to Switzerland? Will Gerber prove he's a good German and help? And will Pike take with him Anna, a woman who was forced into her role by threats to return her to Ravensbruck? Garner serves up a puzzled, troubled man who finally figures out the score. Taylor gives us a dedicated German who, however uneasily, realizes his "experiment" has personal costs he didn't bargain on. Saint does a fine job in a role that doesn't give much latitude. And John Banner, as an aging, fat German Home Guard sergeant who shows up during the movie's last 15 minutes, nearly steals the show. Weak spots? Otto Schack. He's just an old-style Hollywood Gestapo man, slimy and opportunistic. Seaton also gives both Saint and Taylor turgid opportunities to reflect on their past and, in Gerber's case, his good motives. And as professional and experienced a screenwriter as Seaton was, the movie at nearly two hours could use some trimming. Still, 36 hours is just what it is, a good war yarn built around a clever double con. We should count our blessings.

The story of a US major kidnapped in May, 1944, by the Germans who try to trick him into believing that he has amnesia, the war is over, the Allies won, and -- by the way, where and when will the D-Day landings take place? The Germans have set up a fake hospital staffed by phony Americans and they rush the unconscious Major Pike (James Garner) there. He is attended by Rod Taylor, a real doctor but wearing an American uniform, and Eva Marie Saint, his fake nurse and wife, who has been chosen for the deception from among the inmates of Ravensbruck.The Germans have been very thorough. Alles in Ordnung. And they convince Garner for a day or two that the concocted story is true. Garner is sufficiently convinced that he spills the beans about the invasion. But he becomes suspicious and for some time exists in two zones, Schrödinger's major. When he finally twigs to the con game, he lies and tells them that he made up the Normandy story. Thereafter, it gets kind of complicated.It's structured like a three-act play. Act I. We see Garner in his habitat in England, going over the invasion plans with other officers. He is told he must meet his contact in Lisbon. He incurs an important paper cut while handling a map. Act II. The ersatz hospital where Rod Taylor explains everything for the thousandth time to the phony staff. Here we see Garner wake up and react to his "amnesia". We then see the penny drop. Act III. An anticlimax in which Garner and Saint escape to Switzerland.It would have made a good Twilight Zone episode. As it is, Act III should have been dropped and more time spent with Garner in the hospital, getting to know the other "patients", becoming friendly with Taylor, developing some affection for Saint. I don't know what they might have filled the story out with, but it's too sketchy. Here is Garner, in this typical VA-type hospital and we only see him talking to Taylor, Saint, and an intrusive and extravagantly stupid SS officer posing as a civilian. Garner has lost six years of his life, as far as he knows, and he simply doesn't snoop around enough for missing information. How can he wander around and not stop a pinchbeck patient at random and ask how the Sox are doing? Or whether Mammy Yokum got out of the cabbage patch? And I wish the SS officer hadn't been so obviously a pig. The guy looks like Elmer Fudd. He's manipulative, craven, obsequious, "practical" as he puts it. The SS officer is a real stereotype, too. He's fat, arrogant, and has a hang-worthy neck the width of one of the Parthenon pillars. He ends every sentence with a rhetorical, "Huh?" The German soldiers, when they are in American uniforms, look like anybody you might stop on the street. But when the jig is up, soldiers in German uniforms take over and they are pudgy, jowly, and ugly. How retro can you get? The movie is over-directed too. Example: There's a scene in which Saint and Garner are sitting across from each other. She's knitting. Garner has become suspicious and is silently probing a bookcase looking for something -- anything -- that describes post-war events. Saint's job is to keep an eye on him without revealing that she's doing so. Garner is supposed to be hiding his doubts. You and I -- total amateurs at the business -- could do a better job of enacting the roles. Garner is supposed to act naturally, be casual, but he's frowning as he flips through the books and his suspicions grow. Saint should be concentrating on her knitting with only an occasional flick of her glance at Garner, but she virtually stops knitting and stares goggle-eyed at Garner. It's like watching a Cecil B. DeMille movie where every nuance is shoved down your throat. Just open a little wider please.Interesting byplay towards the end between Garner and Taylor when the Reveal has been made and Garner is about to be toted off for interrogation by the SS. What do you suppose they'll do to me? asks Garner. "Oh, they'll probably start off with something simple first. Maybe sleep deprivation. A trick they picked up from the Russians. Deprive a man of sleep and you make him fuzzy, confuse his allegiances." It makes the SS sound like St. Francis of Assisi, compared to the "enhanced interrogation" of today.Rod Taylor's character is supposed to have been born in America and spent his first sixteen years there before coming to Germany, but he wouldn't fool me for a minute because he uses the expression "different to", a British locution, rather than the American "different from" or "different than". Eva Marie Saint wouldn't fool me either. I know a person from Newark, New Jersey, when I see one.I've kind of made fun of some of the movie but it's not actually badly done. I was impressed the first time I saw it. What a delicious trap the Germans have set. It's pretty suspenseful in Act II and the tension is underlined in Dmitri Tiomkin's score, with its familiar crashing, dramatic chords and its clanging bells. Worth catching.