Did you people see the same film I saw?

Entertaining from beginning to end, it maintains the spirit of the franchise while establishing it's own seal with a fun cast

In other words,this film is a surreal ride.

This is one of the few movies I've ever seen where the whole audience broke into spontaneous, loud applause a third of the way in.

Shortly before the Nazi invasion of Czechoslovakia, Axel Bomasch, a weapons engineer working on an improved form of armour plating, discovers that he is on the Nazis' hit list for capture so that his invention can be used on German tanks. He prepares to leave the country with his daughter Anna but his timing of critically off to the point that he just barely escapes just when the Nazis manage to invade. Anna, unfortunately, is arrested before she even leaves the house. Anna languishes in a concentration camp until she meets another prisoner, a former teacher named Karl Morsen who decides to help her escape & flee to England where her father has set up shop. But what Anna doesn't know is that Morsen is actually a Nazi spy tasked with capturing Axel, using Anna as bait. Once the pair reach England, he puts his plan into action & succeeds in abducting Anna & her father, taking them to Germany by submarine. The British, determined to rectify this, send their best man, Gus Bennett, a British secret agent who has been undercover as a war songs musician. Bennett arrives in Germany, pretending to be a German army colonel, & makes it onto the train that is carrying the Bomasch family to Munich. Meeting up with Anna & her father, Bennett fools the Germans into thinking that he was Anna's former lover & that he will convince them to stay & help the Nazis. But Morsen, also on the train, suspects otherwise. It is only through the help of two of Bennett's old friends, a pair of British tourists, who overhear Morsen's plans that Bennett is able to achieve his objective.This World War II-era spy thriller is an interesting film for film buffs. Despite its datedness & slow pace, the film is a reasonable spy thriller with dashes of comedy & even an exciting climax where Rex Harrison & his friends make a daring escape from the Nazis.Night Train to Munich was made shortly after the War began & takes place on the night it eventuated. Of course, there is no mention to the most infamous brutality of the Nazi regime, probably because at this point in time the Nazis' program of genocide was still being formulated, although the state of fear that they created in their territory was common knowledge. The film also shows some elements of Nazi brutality in their state, such as prisoners being beaten & teachers jailed for not forcing their students to teach German, as well as a worker being interrogated for accidentally making an off-hand remark about the Nazi regime.For acting, Rex Harrison makes an excellent prototype James Bond, the My Fair Lady star proving to be a remarkably good secret agent who is able to fool the Nazis & achieve his objectives, rescuing the victims from their Nazi oppressors.

One of Carol Reed's earlier works, it can't be all bad, though it's propelled by the usual propaganda of the war years. It opens with Hitler in a long shot, having a tantrum and banging his fist on a map of Austria. Dissolve to boots goose stepping down the Austrian streets. Back to Hitler, howling about the Sudetenland and slamming his fist on the map. Horses, carriages, ranks of soldiers in Nazi helmets, flags flying, in Czechoslovakia. We get the impression that Hitler's yen for Lebensraum is infinite and will never be satisfied until he plants the swastika all over the world, including Hoboken and the North Pole.You have to love the rooms these movie dictators occupy. Hitler's office is the size of O'Hare Airport and there are two sets of small round tables and chairs on the floor, period. If you were seated at one table and wanted to speak to someone at the other, you'd have to walk fifty feet. I'd love to live in a palace with rooms like that, instead of this abandoned railway car in the middle of the Chichuahuan desert.It's an enjoyable thriller with many comic moments, most of them provided by Radford and Wayne, fretting over golf clubs, as they fumed over missing the cricket match in Hitchcock's "The Lady Vanishes." They also gave some respite to the horror and mystery of "Dead of Night" in 1945.The plot is too complicated to describe in any detail. Rex Harrison is a special agent impersonating a major in the Wehrmacht in order to smuggle the appealing Margaret Lockwood and her scientist father out of Germany to the safety of neutral Switzerland. Paul Henreid is an SS officer determined to spoil their plans.The performances are adequate to the task, which isn't very demanding, but wardrobe had not gotten down with any accuracy the uniforms worn by the Germans. Harrison has a tall, lean figure and a face with the dimensions of John Carradine's. And, booted, in his tight army uniform with its riding breeches and too-tall cap, from certain angles he could pass for a cross between a human being and a giraffe. Paul Henreid (née Paul Georg Julius Hernreid Ritter von Wassel-Waldingau in Austria-Hungary) is usually a hero, as in "Casablanca" but he also proves himself to be a capable and handsome villain.It's certainly of the period, but I enjoyed it.

At his best, Carol Reed was a brilliant director, but most of his brilliance came out in a brief period in the late 1940s, and his work both before and after shows little of that genius, even when it's good.Night Train to Munich is a movie that gives no indication of Reed's future brilliance, although it is a movie that improves steadily as it progresses. The early scenes are very weak, little snippets of scenes that try and set up the premise as quickly as possible, so that you don't feel the movie has really even started until almost a half hour in.The movie picks up as it slows down and settles in to the meat of the story, which involves a re-rescue attempt. There is a little suspense, a little humor, and some likable - and unlikable - characters.The movie picks up again with the surprising appearance of Charters and Caldicott, the two humorously oblivious Englishmen from Hitchock's The Lady Vanishes. Once they are in the movie, they are a major part of it, and it becomes fairly interesting (Charters and Caldicott, and similar character played by the same actors, went on to achieve a good deal of popularity in other movies and on radio. Hitchcock has said he is very pleased to have put the two together).The last half hour is quite decent, although even at its best it never reaches the heights of Reed's best work. Overall I'm not sure this movie is worth watching. My advice would be to fast forward to the first scene with Rex Harrison (who is quite good, as usual); you can use wikipedia to catch you up on the early part of the film. I think that would make it more enjoyable.

Carol Reed displays his ability to combine the elements of a superb thriller with the droll comedy of the English drawing room in this espionage suspense film set during WWII.Rex Harrison shines as a Brit disguising himself as a Nazi officer so he can infiltrate German headquarters and make off with a scientist and his daughter being held captive. The film culminates in a nail-biting finale set on the German/Swiss border.Bland Margaret Lockwood plays the heroine, but it doesn't much matter that she's pretty much a drip, because Harrison is the one you want to watch anyway. Paul Henreid equips himself well as an evil German.Aside from Harrison, the highlight of the film are the incidental characters played by Basil Radford and Naunton Wayne, who play two uninvolved British civilians who are persuaded to help Harrison's team outwit the Nazis and who react exactly the same to Nazis shooting at them as they do Nazis stealing their seats on the train. These two actors were paired up and used in a very similar way in Alfred Hitchcock's film from a few years prior, "The Lady Vanishes." Though its year of release here is listed as 1940, "Night Train to Munich" was nominated for a 1941 Academy Award in the category of Best Original Story (Gordon Wellesley), an award it lost to Harry Segall for "Here Comes Mr. Jordan." Grade: A