523 Night Train to Munich

[jbeall]

Mildly diverting, but I can't imagine Criterion would have gone anywhere near the film if Carol Reed's name were not attached to it. Of all the Fox films to license...

Yeah, this felt really slight to me, with Rex Harrison's constant smirk further undermining already-lightweight fare. I suppose it was too long to be an extra on The Lady Vanishes, but I really can't see why Criterion bothered.

[HistoryProf]

well the above is a bit much in terms of completely dismissing this, but I do agree it's hardly a masterpiece. That said, it's a gem of a flick that's fascinating to watch in hindsight, knowing what was about to befall Europe. Personally, i'm always fascinated by these late 30s to 1940 films that are essentially historical documents preserving the pulse of public opinion and providing some hilarious bits at the same time. the blatant "nudge nudge wink wink" scene early on had me in stitches, while Caldicott and Charters served as a nice peanut gallery in addition to aiding the final escape.

In short, it's a fine film, and I rather despise the whole "this doesn't deserve a spine #" elitism. this isn't a landmark of film history, but it is a fascinating glimpse into the world on the eve of WWII, helmed by Reed, and all in all 90 minutes of good fun. Not every film in the collection need require dissertations and multiple viewings to appreciate.

Oh, and while I was annoyed this was not on blu ray, I have to say the transfer is absolutely superb. A few moments of damage, like 2 or 3 I can recall, but over all it looks stunning...and I honestly can't imagine it looking a whole lot better. I suspect this was a case where it simply wasn't worth the cost, and the only moments the image quality caught my attention were in moments of amazement at how good it looked. So if you were refusing to buy it because it wasn't on blu, drop that silly notion and get it already...it looks great.

[MichaelB]

In short, it's a fine film, and I rather despise the whole "this doesn't deserve a spine #" elitism. this isn't a landmark of film history, but it is a fascinating glimpse into the world on the eve of WWII, helmed by Reed, and all in all 90 minutes of good fun. Not every film in the collection need require dissertations and multiple viewings to appreciate.

It was certainly helmed by Reed, but it's not a film d'auteur by any stretch of the imagination. Or rather, as Philip Kemp, Bruce Babington and Peter William Evans all emphasise in the extras, Frank Launder and Sidney Gilliat have an equally valid claim to authorship, not least because the film can easily be read as the final instalment of a four-film cycle of comedy-thrillers about trains and Europe (Rome Express, 1932; Seven Sinners, 1936; The Lady Vanishes, 1938) or the first instalment of an equally impressive series charting the British experience of World War II (Millions Like Us, 1943; Two Thousand Women, 1944; The Rake's Progress, 1945; I See a Dark Stranger, 1946).

Personally, I thoroughly enjoyed Night Train to Munich - as with pretty much anything scripted by Launder and Gilliat made between the late 1930s and early 1950s, it's an expertly constructed piece of popular entertainment that also manages to cram in some surprisingly serious points of social/political/historical commentary. True, it probably helps that I've seen at least 90% of their other major films, and also that I've been exploring the BFI's box set If War Should Come (a riveting collection of documentaries that were mostly made during the so-called "phoney war" of 1939-40), but I suspect I'd have got a fair bit out of it regardless.

[jbeall]

In short, it's a fine film, and I rather despise the whole "this doesn't deserve a spine #" elitism. this isn't a landmark of film history, but it is a fascinating glimpse into the world on the eve of WWII, helmed by Reed, and all in all 90 minutes of good fun. Not every film in the collection need require dissertations and multiple viewings to appreciate.

Fair enough on the last point here, and I should have phrased my remarks more carefully. Of course Criterion can give a spine # to whatever they want and can get the rights to, and some of those decisions are based on someone's personal affection for a film (for example, Jonathan Turell's affection for Robinson Crusoe on Mars, a film I enjoyed). I began Night Train to Munich with reasonably high expectations, but frankly I just didn't like it. This is a personal reaction, but C&C felt really stale this time around and Harrison smirking his way through the film just annoyed me to no end. Ah well, it's not the first CC film I didn't like, and it surely won't be the last.

[HistoryProf]

It was certainly helmed by Reed, but it's not a film d'auteur by any stretch of the imagination. Or rather, as Philip Kemp, Bruce Babington and Peter William Evans all emphasise in the extras, Frank Launder and Sidney Gilliat have an equally valid claim to authorship, not least because the film can easily be read as the final instalment of a four-film cycle of comedy-thrillers about trains and Europe (Rome Express, 1932; Seven Sinners, 1936; The Lady Vanishes, 1938) or the first instalment of an equally impressive series charting the British experience of World War II (Millions Like Us, 1943; Two Thousand Women, 1944; The Rake's Progress, 1945; I See a Dark Stranger, 1946).

Personally, I thoroughly enjoyed Night Train to Munich - as with pretty much anything scripted by Launder and Gilliat made between the late 1930s and early 1950s, it's an expertly constructed piece of popular entertainment that also manages to cram in some surprisingly serious points of social/political/historical commentary. True, it probably helps that I've seen at least 90% of their other major films, and also that I've been exploring the BFI's box set If War Should Come (a riveting collection of documentaries that were mostly made during the so-called "phoney war" of 1939-40), but I suspect I'd have got a fair bit out of it regardless.

Your first point is one I intended to emphasize as well but failed to - well enough since you did so far better than I could have. And your second sums up my feelings on it quite well - I too found it expertly crafted and enjoyed it for not having any pretention to being something more than it was: a bit of entertainment in an increasingly uncertain world. That it managed to insert a little humor alongside the political intrigue/commentary without taking itself too seriously only added to my enjoyment of the film. It's a lot funnier than I thought it would be.

[ianungstad]

I don't think the film really did enough to portray the Nazis as evil and a threat to the British Empire. In fact the Nazis don't really even do anything particularly bad or sinister in the film. The invasion scenes are limited to an aerial drop of propaganda fliers and causing mild inconvenience at the train station. The rest of the film has a cartoonish plot that uses a mcguffin plot device (a secret formula for super strength armor plating) that seems pretty generic to this kind of story. Since this is a work of propaganda, it fails in establishing any immediacy or sincerity with it's message about real world events and rather comes across like some cheap dime store novel.

I also found it strange that as the stakes in the film continues to escalate, rather than racketing up the tension and suspense, the film's pacing becomes increasingly deflated. Once Rex Harrison's character goes undercover as a Nazi to rescue the daughter and father, the film becomes increasingly talky and tries to inject comedic and romantic elements that ruin some of the nice tension that was built up in it's opening act. These various elements don't seem to mix well and the middle portion of the movie is quite sluggish.

Charters and Caldicott weren't particularly funny in this film. At least in The Lady Vanishes they seem to get a character arc that takes them from being reluctant to get involved with the proceedings to being active participants, here it barely takes anything to get them to be chest beating patriots. They seem to be even more one-note somehow...

The ending is terrible. No real resolution and comes out of nowhere. It just ends and it really took me off guard.

This was easily the weakest title Criterion has released in a stellar year. I don't know why they bothered with this film. It's not a disaster by and means but it's pretty mediocre.

[MichaelB]

I don't think the film really did enough to portray the Nazis as evil and a threat to the British Empire. In fact the Nazis don't really even do anything particularly bad or sinister in the film.

But why would they have done, in a film made during the "phoney war" where nothing very much was actually happening? The notion that Nazis were uniquely evil hadn't taken root then, for the obvious reason that most of what we now attribute to them - the invasion of western Europe, the Blitz, the extermination camps - hadn't happened yet.

In fact, the British Board of Film Censors had only recently relaxed its restrictions on what filmmakers could say about the Germans, having previously been ruthless about censoring overtly anti-German political comment - the explicitly anti-Nazi film Pastor Hall was initially rejected at the script stage, and only went into production in 1940. And until 1939, at least one major British newspaper, the Daily Mail, was actually quite keen on Hitler, something it's understandably keen to play down today.

As I said above, this is what makes British films made in late 1939 and early 1940 - documentary and fiction alike - so fascinating for people who know about the historical background, because they capture a mindset that's hard to fathom without that context. Ironically, in criticising the film for failing to portray the Nazis as evil, you've highlighted precisely what it is that makes it so interesting today.

Well, not much in the way of bonus features. You'd think there would have been a commentary track or something to flesh it out. It seems like British films from this era really have a lack of material to work with re: bonus features.

It depends on how imaginative the DVD producers are prepared to be. As is becoming clear from the comments in this thread alone, the more you know about the background history, the more interesting the film is - and while there may not be much material in connection with its production, there are loads of documentaries that revealingly capture the British mindset at the time of the "phoney war".

To be fair to Criterion, I suspect the BFI's If War Should Come came out too late to influence them, but one or two of the films in that collection would have made fascinating extras - as would the propaganda films made by Ealing Studios at about the same time: mini-melodramas about the dangers of consorting with people who may well be German spies.

[John Hodson]

This was easily the weakest title Criterion has released in a stellar year. I don't know why they bothered with this film. It's not a disaster by and means but it's pretty mediocre.

I couldn't disagree more; it's quite delicious - I've just watched Desperate Journey (in which the Nazis are portrayed not only as evil, but as stereotypical buffoons who couldn't hit a barn door with a bren gun) and compared to that slice of ripe propaganda, 'Night Train' can easily stand alongside Powell and Pressburger's wartime output (I'm thinking particularly Contraband here); witty, intelligent, thrilling.

[Cold Bishop]

I've just watched Desperate Journey (in which the Nazis are portrayed not only as evil, but as stereotypical buffoons who couldn't hit a barn door with a bren gun) and compared to that slice of ripe propaganda,'Night Train' can easily stand alongside Powell and Pressburger's wartime output (I'm thinking particularly Contraband here)

Have you seen De Toth's None Shall Escape? It surely must take the cake for vicious portrayal of Nazis in a wartime film. In one scene, they machine gun the entire Jewish population of a town, intimating at some acknowledgment of a genocide going on in Europe, all this before the liberation of the camps.

That and the moments of Address Unknown that manage to avoid hysterics are hard to beat. Of course, there's a four year gap separating them from Reed's film.

[Howard Roark]

I don't think the film really did enough to portray the Nazis as evil and a threat to the British Empire. In fact the Nazis don't really even do anything particularly bad or sinister in the film. The invasion scenes are limited to an aerial drop of propaganda fliers and causing mild inconvenience at the train station. The rest of the film has a cartoonish plot that uses a mcguffin plot device (a secret formula for super strength armor plating) that seems pretty generic to this kind of story. Since this is a work of propaganda, it fails in establishing any immediacy or sincerity with it's message about real world events and rather comes across like some cheap dime store novel.

I also found it strange that as the stakes in the film continues to escalate, rather than racketing up the tension and suspense, the film's pacing becomes increasingly deflated. Once Rex Harrison's character goes undercover as a Nazi to rescue the daughter and father, the film becomes increasingly talky and tries to inject comedic and romantic elements that ruin some of the nice tension that was built up in it's opening act. These various elements don't seem to mix well and the middle portion of the movie is quite sluggish.

Charters and Caldicott weren't particularly funny in this film. At least in The Lady Vanishes they seem to get a character arc that takes them from being reluctant to get involved with the proceedings to being active participants, here it barely takes anything to get them to be chest beating patriots. They seem to be even more one-note somehow...

The ending is terrible. No real resolution and comes out of nowhere. It just ends and it really took me off guard.

This was easily the weakest title Criterion has released in a stellar year. I don't know why they bothered with this film. It's not a disaster by and means but it's pretty mediocre.

We all have our opinions. I highly enjoyed it. The time really flew by for me. It was a clever thriller in the vein of Hitchcock. I thought it was stylishly photographed and sharply scripted. By the way, does a director really need to inform the audience that the Nazi's were evil? Talk about spoon feeding!

[scotty2]

The film is dealing with a similar problem Chaplin faced with The Great Dictator. Few in the west understood in 1939 (when the films were beginning production) just what underpinned the Nazi regime and what its full implications would be. Territorially aggressive dictatorial state? Yes. Most morally repugnant and evil regime one could conceive of? Not yet. The Battle of Britain hadn't even started when Night Train was written and, I believe filmed, so the horror of the bombing wasn't even a factor yet.

Of course the signs of the full Nazi agenda were there in plain view for everyone to see had they been inclined to look, but I think it is asking a lot of these popular entertainments to fully account for this when the mainstream press in Europe and the US hadn't really done the job and politicians on both sides of the Atlantic hadn't made an issue of it either, despite their knowledge of what was going on. Chaplin honed in on the persecution of Jews, but later regretted that he had made Hitler into a comic figure. It took time for the enormity of it all to sink in.

A very good book on the subject of what was known when and what information reached the general public is Deborah Lipstadt's Beyond Belief: The American Press and the Coming of the Holocaust, 1933-1945. The signs were there in 1933, but few were looking.

[MichaelB]

The film is dealing with a similar problem Chaplin faced with The Great Dictator. Few in the west understood in 1939 (when the films were beginning production) just what underpinned the Nazi regime and what its full implications would be. Territorially aggressive dictatorial state? Yes. Most morally repugnant and evil regime one could conceive of? Not yet. The Battle of Britain hadn't even started when Night Train was written and, I believe filmed, so the horror of the bombing wasn't even a factor yet.

It started production on 21 December 1939 and was submitted to the BBFC on 13 June 1940, so it's probably a safe bet that it was completed during or before May, and would certainly have been in the can before Hitler invaded France. Probably well before, as it doesn't strike me as the kind of film that took months to make - as the hilariously dodgy model work at the end rather gives away.

In other words, the creation of the film more or less perfectly spanned the "phoney war" period (September 1939-May 1940), and so any criticism of its stance towards the Nazis needs to be set against that rather crucial historical fact. For a more recent point of comparison, look at something like Rambo III, which openly supported the mujahideen in Afghanistan - a far more politically problematic position from today's perspective than would have been the case in the 1980s.

Of course the signs of the full Nazi agenda were there in plain view for everyone to see had they been inclined to look, but I think it is asking a lot of these popular entertainments to fully account for this when the mainstream press in Europe and the US hadn't really done the job and politicians on both sides of the Atlantic hadn't made an issue of it either, despite their knowledge of what was going on. Chaplin honed in on the persecution of Jews, but later regretted that he had made Hitler into a comic figure. It took time for the enormity of it all to sink in.

Even the persecution of the Jews up to 1940 wasn't especially outrageous by European standards, as Armenians in 1915 would readily confirm (assuming they survived the experience). But there was very much a tradition of portraying Hitler as a comedy buffoon in the 1930s, and although I think Night Train to Munich is slightly more aware than its immediate predecessors that the Nazis weren't especially amusing, there's still a strong element of that tradition. After all, Launder and Gilliat had learned their screenwriting craft firmly within the mainstream commercial entertainment sector - it was only in the 1940s that their work became more socially and politically conscious. But you can certainly see the roots of it in Night Train to Munich - if you're inclined to look for them.

[HistoryProf]

Good discussion!

I don't think the film really did enough to portray the Nazis as evil and a threat to the British Empire. In fact the Nazis don't really even do anything particularly bad or sinister in the film.

Just to add to MichaelB's excellent comments on this point - this is precisely what is so fascinating about the film and why British films from this slim period where there were suspicions, but no one could possibly understand what Hitler was really up to yet are so interesting to watch now. You are applying a measure of hindsight here that simply isn't a fair critique - because when the film was written the Nazis WEREN'T a threat to the Empire. Indeed, right at this point the British thought they had succeeded (as well as Stalin) in appeasing Hitler and making sure everything would continue to hum along.

This little gem of a flick captures a very unique and shortlived moment in history where Europe was at the precipice of disaster - but no one realized it until it was too late. So of course the Nazis seem almost nice as patsies here...that's how the British viewed them. Sure scientists were fleeing to America and elsewhere, but if you weren't Jewish there wasn't much to be worried about, or so it seemed. In addition to the excellent suggestion above by scotty, i'd also recommend _Why We Watched: Europe, America, and the Holocaust_ by Scott Hamerow - we're only just beginning to acknowledge and seriously study the widespread denial about Hitler that continued well into the war itself. The West will need to confront their complicity in the Holocaust some day.

In the meantime, however, films like this one help us to understand the mindset of the time - while also being plain old entertaining. Gotta like that.

[ianungstad]

I did not mean that the film fails to showcase the horrors the Nazis commited during the second world war. This film is a work of propoganda, trying to impart a serious message on it's viewing audience about dangerous things brewing in Europe. I just thought it failed because the film didn't really seem to portray anything that would be frightening or relevant to it's audience. The villains in this film seem to be on par with a bad James Bond film or cheap drugstore spy novel, almost divorced from anything resembling reality. If the point of the film was for propoganada purposes, the threat should be at least credible to it's viewing audience.

[MichaelB]

The villains in this film seem to be on par with a bad James Bond film or cheap drugstore spy novel, almost divorced from anything resembling reality.

Absolutely. The film is squarely in line with pre-war entertainment - the Rex Harrison character is close kin to someone like Bulldog Drummond, Richard Hannay or Raffles, with which the audience of the time would have been extremely familiar. In his book on Reed, Peter William Evans highlights many of the similarities, including a line that explicitly acknowledges links to Bulldog Drummond.

If the point of the film was for propoganada purposes, the threat should be at least credible to it's viewing audience.

But it wasn't. In fact, the first draft of the script wasn't even set in Germany - the original Gordon Wellesley story was set in a mythical Ruritanian state named Ironica. It was Britain declaring war on Germany on 3 September 1939 that led to a rethink - not least because the BBFC had relaxed its stance on criticism of German political issues, so a film that probably couldn't have been made before then (at least in its final form) was suddenly viable.

In any case, it seems to me that an audience in mid-1940, which would have spent months being bombarded with genuine propaganda about the Nazi menace (pretty much every cinema programme would have included something, and cinemagoing was a weekly if not daily event for many at that time), hardly needed a comedy-thriller to ram the point home.

[John Hodson]

As Michael points out, the film fits in perfectly with contemporary attitudes; Charters and Caldicott embody a warning to the British not to be complacent, and particularly one of not underestimating the threat - the scene in the train corridor with the army officer who tells them he would have them 'crawl on their fat bellies' is a wake up call to C&C (and the audience). The film isn't filled with Nazi stereotypes (that would come as the war didn't finish by Christmas) but the threat is clear enough.

Concentration camps are presented as quite nasty places, of imprisonment of torture (and you can quite easily see the Star of David on the tattered uniforms of a line of prisoners as they shuffle past in the first camp scene); no one could imagine, in 1940, what horrors lay ahead. No-one would have believed human beings capable of such.

Above all all it's witty, crammed with gags, but there are few comedy Nazis and for that, personally, I give thanks. Reed is very sadly under-valued today - not on this forum I'm sure, but generally he's not lauded as the giant that he was.

BTW, re the hated window-boxing - the clips in the featurette aren't so presented. Why continue this practice Criterion?

[HistoryProf]

Concentration camps are presented as quite nasty places, of imprisonment of torture (and you can quite easily see the Star of David on the tattered uniforms of a line of prisoners as they shuffle past in the first camp scene); no one could imagine, in 1940, what horrors lay ahead. No-one would have believed human beings capable of such.

This is also an excellent point. Of course from our perspective, seeing the opening scenes in a camp that we know is about to start building ovens and gas chambers, the horror underlies everything. But in 1940 those elements had yet to be added to the camp system, and they were generally understood as labor camps. Seedy and something to be concerned about for sure, but systematic genocide of 9 million jews, gypsies, poles, homosexuals, etc? No one could have foreseen that.

It's always struck me how cavalierly mentions of the camps are in films from the late 30s into 1941 or so...I recall the first time hearing someone refer to a concentration camp in a late 30s film and thinking "but I thought no one knew about them until after the war?!?" - but of course they knew....they just didn't know how horrific they would become once Hitler overstretched his military and things started going south. So when you see these concentration camps in films from this brief period where they knew Hitler was bad, that these places existed, but they would be short lived and certainly just a way to control populations and utilize them as a source of labor. From that perspective, you can see that while they are shown as nasty places, there is no real sense of the ominous foreboding of what is to come...because it didn't exist at the time. I think that's fascinating...and speaks considerably to the lengths the British were going to try and temper fears and reassure their citizens that it's not THAT bad...don't worry! Unfortunately, that message rang more and more hollow and by 1941 was gone completely.

But that leaves us with these gems from 1938-1940 where it was firmly part of the purpose in making films in these settings. I think all of this would make a fantastic book - Russian/English/French/Italian film from 1935 to 1940 - before the Reich's intentions are 100% clear.

[colinr0380]

We should remember that concept of interning people in concentration camps was not exactly a new idea. They might be for obvious reasons most associated with Nazi atrocities now (making them perhaps more correctly termed as extermination camps, but of course that wouldn't be how they would be officially referred to) but they were regularly used - for example the term 'concentration camp' was first used with regard to the Boer War, and it could be suggested that the United States used concentration camps to contain Japanese Americans once they entered the war (something that is tackled in Come See The Paradise).

[John Hodson]

In general, don't you think Chaplin in all likelihood understood the full horror of what was going on, but made an artistic decision to play the material with a delicate balance of comedy and seriousness, just as Lubitsch does in To be or Not to Be?

Just how this refelcets at all on the Reed, I really cannot say!!

I can't quite see the point you're making here; just how does it reflect on Reed?

[HistoryProf]

We should remember that concept of interning people in concentration camps was not exactly a new idea. They might be for obvious reasons most associated with Nazi atrocities now (making them perhaps more correctly termed as extermination camps, but of course that wouldn't be how they would be officially referred to) but they were regularly used - for example the term 'concentration camp' was first used with regard to the Boer War, and it could be suggested that the United States used concentration camps to contain Japanese Americans once they entered the war (something that is tackled in Come See The Paradise).

Indeed, the use of camps back to the 1880s in Africa - by the British in cases - was well known and an ugly practice. Indeed, it was in many ways innovated in the United States with the removal of American Indians - who were collected into dank, disease-ridden camps by gunpoint and forced to do the labor that would help move them west across the Mississippi. The Reservation system, cloaked in the desire to "civilize" Indians furthered the practice - which then found new targets in places like the Philippines in the early 20th century.

So yes, the practice of collecting "undesirables" together in camps for their protection or whatever other excuse could be contrived was in no way an innovation of the Third Reich. This again, however, does help explain the initial seemingly tepid response from the U.S, France, and Britain - who had all done the same in their empires to one extent or another. In short, they didn't really agree with it, but they could understand. (Isn't that a Chris Rock joke about OJ?)

[scotty2]

The Roosevelt Administration actually referred to "concentration camps" in their pre-war planning for Japanese American internment. That's right. Prior to Pearl Harbor. They didn't use the term openly once they implemented the plan, however.

[scotty2]

Just to make one more point about awareness: even when the camps were liberated in 1945, journalists and editors did not immediately know what they were seeing. Early press reports guessed that the victims were "political prisoners." It took quite some time to connect what to us seem obvious dots and identify Jews as the target of a plan of extermination. Latent anti-Semitism, American isolationism, and other factors having to do with politics at the higher levels prevented most sane people from really grasping and dealing with what was going on prior to the war, which meant that most sane people couldn't fathom exactly what they were looking at once the hell went on full horrific display at war's end. I'm not excusing anyone because the information was absolutely available, but it took considerably more than a google search to put the pieces together in any kind of coherent fashion. Sorry for the digression.

[John Hodson]

The intention was simply to invoke history to show that any sane person should have been aware by 1939, before war was declared, of what was going on in Hitler's Reich.

I know - knew - quite a few 'sane people' who, whilst aware that to be Jewish in Hitler's Europe was Not A Good Thing, were horrified to learn after the war of the scale of the insanity, that people were exterminated on an industrial scale. It was simply beyond belief.

Reed's film is what it is; that it chooses not to, ostensibly, reveal the Nazis as mass murderers to be has nothing to do, IMHO, with the turning of collective (or singular) backs. But hey, who knows, it could be conclusive evidence of contemporary Britain as a nest of smug, self-interested, anti-Semitic bastards.

[Jonathan S]

But hey, who knows, it could be conclusive evidence of contemporary Britain as a nest of smug, self-interested, anti-Semitic bastards.

Admittedly this is still in the realm of fiction, but some wartime British novels do suggest that quite directly, such as Patrick Hamilton's Hangover Square (nothing like the later Hollywood film), published 1941 but set in 1939. Some of its key characters - "ordinary" Britishers, not evil Fifth Columnists - are portrayed as Hitler supporters, including the heroine Netta:

She was supposed to dislike fascism, to laugh at it, but actually she liked it enormously. In secret she liked pictures of marching, regimented men, in secret she was physically attracted by Hitler: she did not really think that Mussolini looked like a funny burglar. She liked the uniforms, the guns, the breeches, the boots, the swastikas, the shirts. She was, probably, sexually stimulated by these things in the same way as she might have been sexually stimulated by a bullfight. And somehow she was dimly aware of the class content of all this; she connected it with her own secret social aspirations and she would have liked to have seen something of the same thing in this country. She was bored to distraction by the idea of a war, of course, and hence arose her glorious joy at the time of Munich when, at one stroke, war was averted and the thing which she was supposed to dislike and laugh at, but to which she was so drawn in reality, was allowed to proceed with renewed power upon its way.

Quite a contrast to the patriotic wartime propaganda movies we made!

[John Hodson]

We're all aware of Oswald Mosley and his Blackshirts; every country had - has - its fascist element. But I kick against a suggestion that simply because Night Train To Munich fails, overtly, to portray the Nazis as butchers to be it points to a deliberate policy on this particular film of covering eyes, ears and mouth (and I'm aware that there was a deal of that going on at government level).