It is a performances centric movie

I cannot think of one single thing that I would change about this film. The acting is incomparable, the directing deft, and the writing poignantly brilliant.

It’s not bad or unwatchable but despite the amplitude of the spectacle, the end result is underwhelming.

what a terribly boring film. I'm sorry but this is absolutely not deserving of best picture and will be forgotten quickly. Entertaining and engaging cinema? No. Nothing performances with flat faces and mistaking silence for subtlety.

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.

This is an interesting and enjoyable war movie involving espionage, kidnapping and rescuing people in the early days of World War II. "Night Train to Munich" came out in August 1940 in Great Britain and in December in the U.S. Up to that time, the Allies had very little they could boast about to raise hopes and boost morale. The film setting is 1939 – at the official start of WW II when Germany invaded Poland (Sept 1, 1939). But, by the film's release date, Germany had since invaded Denmark, Norway, France, Belgium and the Netherlands; and, the Battle of Britain had begun in July of 1940. So, this film no doubt served as a morale booster at the time. While the Allies couldn't show much hope with battles being fought and won, they could make films about successes in spy and rescue events. While the story for this film is fictitious, there were many instances in which Allied and underground efforts helped people escape the Nazis. Early in the 1930s, British economist William Beveridge established the Academic Assistance Council that helped 1,500 Jewish and other academics escape Germany. Albert Einstein, John Maynard Keynes, Ernest Rutherford and others supported the group. This film has a fine cast, with Rex Harrison in the lead as Gus Bennett, a British secret service agent whose real name is Dickie Randall. Margaret Lockwood has the female lead as Anna Bomasch. The movie mixes some early witty dialog and humor with intrigue and suspense as Gus launches his rescue attempt to get Anna and her scientist father, Axel Bomasch (played by James Harcourt) out of Germany to Switzerland. This is just the second appearance of a comic duo who would go on to appear in a number of films with their dry humor. Basil Radford and Naunton Wayne are Charters and Caldicott, whom Gus enlists in his rescue effort. Paul Henreid plays a somewhat gentle yet nasty Nazi, Karl Marsen. While this is a very good movie, I found some things in it that were odd. First was the naiveté of Anna in her first escape to England with Karl. Why would she believe Karl that she needed to hide, and not go directly to British authorities to find her father? Second was her crass attitude toward Gus Bennett who had reunited her with her father. She was a Yugoslav refugee in Great Britain under the protection of the British government, yet she treated her protector with disdain. I think the comedy could have been greatly reworked here so that she doesn't come off as a nag and ungrateful complainer. Here are a couple examples of the comedy dialog between the two.Anna, "Nothing that happened to me in that concentration camp (in 1939, before she escaped the first time) was quite as dreadful as listening to you day after day singing those appalling songs." Gus, "With those few words, you've knocked the bottom out of my entire existence." Anna, "Pity I only knocked it."Anna, "You know, if a woman ever loved you like you love yourself, it would be one of the romances of history." Gus, "Since I'm unlikely to think of an adequate reply to that, I think we ought to drink a toast. England expects that every secret service man this night shall do his duty." He pulls the cork on a champagne bottle that doesn't pop. "Flat!"One quick scene I found very amusing was of a newsstand that had enlarged ad boards of Hitler's book, "Mein Kampf." In between them was an equally large ad board for Margaret Mitchell's novel, "Gone With the Wind."Finally, there was quite a lot wrong with the last scene and the escape over a cable car from Germany to Switzerland. When the Nazis arrived, bullets began to fly as Gus fends them off while the rest make the cable crossing. The distance had to be several hundred yards. The gun play reminded me of the "B" Westerns I went to as a kid growing up in the 1940s and 1950s. Those Western six-shooters often had a dozen or more bullets in them. In this film, Gus appears to have a 32-caliber or similar revolver. The Germans also have similar weapons. The IMDb "Goofs" section notes this. With the advantage of DVD, I could back up the film and count the gunshots. Gus fired his small revolver a full two dozen times. And, he and two Germans who had handguns fired them more than 60 times. There were no scenes of anyone reloading their weapons. Finally, Gus was quite the shooter. He appears to be 200 to 300 yards away when he shoots Karl. Most expert weapons sources say that the maximum effective range for any pistol is about 50 yards. Indeed, the military pistol qualifying range from standing is just 25 yards. The National Rifle Association expert firing distance is 25 feet from standing, using both hands. The silliness of these few instances detract somewhat from the film. Still, it is a very good movie overall, on a subject that later films during the war and after would explore in more detail. Rescuing scientists from the clutches of the Nazis makes interesting viewing -- especially if one doesn't have a big combat action movie to watch.

"Night Train to Munich" (1940) is a smaller and lighter Carol Reed film, a little uncharacteristic, but nevertheless very good. The stars are Margaret Lockwood, Rex Harrison, Paul von Henreid, Basil Radford and Naunton Wayne. A Czech scientist is taken to England for safety so the Nazis won't get him or his work when the Czechs invade, but his daughter Anna (Lockwood) is captured and sent to a concentration camp. While there, she meets Karl Marsen (Paul Henreid as Paul von Henreid) who recognizes one of the Nazi officers at the camp as someone he knew, and the man helps both of them to escape. Once in England, she contacts her father through a performer, Gus Bennett (Harrison), in reality a government agent. Unfortunately, she and her father again fall into enemy hands, and Randell disguises himself as a Nazi officer in order to return to them England.Very suspenseful with great chemistry between the two stars. What helps make this film, though, are Radford and Wayne of "The Lady Vanishes" fame, who are hilarious as two airhead train passengers, one of whom recognizes Harrison as British, though he's in Nazi regalia. The two were an extremely popular pair and appeared together in several films.Very good.

The French are ardently patriotic; the Germans swell with tender pride; the Americans get earnest and emotional; but surely only the English can ever have acquired the idiosyncratic habit of making propaganda by raising a laugh at our own expense? It's a trait that, I suspect, may well leave other nations mystified; but it is this sting of self-deprecating irony that leavens the best of British war films and is characteristic of its era. Coincidentally, it also helps to make them notable long after the event, where more conventional propaganda tends to become ponderous and slightly embarrassing. Englishmen of a certain class have always made a virtue of never taking anything quite seriously -- and so, in lieu of John-Wayne-style heroics, we have Leslie Howard or Rex Harrison serving King and Country under the mask of the charming, seemingly-incompetent amateur.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.