Berlin Express (1948)

Berlin Express is a mystery set shortly after WWII on an Army transport train headed from Paris to Berlin. The train carries an assortment of characters, all with different backgrounds and allegiances. The trip is sidetracked in Frankfurt after the attempted assassination and later kidnapping of a German named Paul Lukas. Lukas has the ideas and wherewithal to deliver a unified post-WWII Germany. Others, however, do not want to see this happen and would rather Germany remain divided. I know a lot of this may sound vague and incomplete, but I've probably already given away too much of the mystery as it is.Overall, I would describe Berlin Express as a nice, but never great, film. The movie opens with a voice-over narration that is absolutely necessary to set-up what's to come. These monologues can sometimes annoy me, but without it here, the film would have taken at least an additional hour to explain what was happening. The acting here is solid, but not necessarily spectacular. Robert Ryan and Merle Oberon head the talented United Nations-style cast. The mystery elements work in Berlin Express. Curt Siodmak is responsible for the twisted, sometimes confusing, but always engaging, screenplay. The big twist to the plot that comes near the 30 minute mark worked almost perfectly on me. It really caught me off guard. Most of the story is told in a documentary, matter-of-fact style that suits the somber surroundings. Speaking of the surroundings, the real star here are the locations. The movie was shot in the actual post-war ruins of Frankfurt. The bombed out building, the crumbling infrastructure, and the gut-wrenching homelessness are filmed magnificently. It's sad and horrific, but absolutely beautiful.

"Berlin Express" (1948) is directed by Jacques Tourneur, who not only made the classic horror films "Cat People" (1942) and "I Walk with a Zombie" (1943), amongst others, under Val Lewton, he made the absolutely unbeatable film noir "Out of the Past" (1947). This semi-noir, his next after "Out of the Past", is nowhere as near as good, although it has its points of interest. It stars Robert Ryan, always good value, along with Merle Oberon and Paul Lukas.The screenplay was written by Curt Siodmak (an intriguing, if patchy, director in his own right) and Harold Medford and concerns a multinational group of train passengers (American, French, English and Russian) who become involved in a post-World War II Nazi assassination plot of a prominent peace activist.The photography by Lucien Ballard is very good and its trump card: the movie was shot on location in Berlin and Frankfurt-am-Main, so this is real post-war devastation you're seeing. In this, and a few other aspects (like Robert Ryan's character) this resembles the far superior "The Third Man" (1949). The main problem here is the script: it relies way too much on voice over narration to propel the film along and all the characters are stereotypes unimaginatively worked out. The direction is very stylish however, which makes the plot deficiencies somewhat more forgivable, even if Tourneur appears to be rather bored with plot mechanics. The acting isn't bad, but there isn't any great demands made on the cast and the standard is no better or worse than any other average Hollywood product of that period.So, no masterpiece, and in many respects, desperately so-so, but noir buffs, you won't need much prompting to take the plunge and watch it.

A young Robert Ryan is one of a multi-national collection of characters on a train bound for Berlin where they are due to hear an address by a Konrad Adanauer style politician who is endeavouring to oversee the peaceful unification of a defeated Germany in the wake of WWII. On board the train, this disparate group of strangers, which includes the politician's secretary, a British diplomat, a Frenchman and a Russian soldier, witness what they believe to be the assassination of the politician, although they later discover that he was actually a double used to divert attention away from the real peacemaker. However, the real politician is then kidnapped by a group of Nazis intent on resurrecting the Third Reich.Berlin Express is a solid enough thriller which clearly had loftier aspirations than most mainstream thrillers, and is considerably enhanced by some location footage of war-blasted Frankfurt that adds real atmosphere to the tale. The film attempts to underline the differences between the various nationalities while simultaneously trying to emphasise the importance of the nations they represent working together to find an acceptable solution to what was clearly a delicate situation at the time. This was before the Russians zoned off their tranche of the country to claim it for Communism, and it's clear that there's a little uncertainty about how to treat their representative – a somewhat stereotypically humourless young soldier – at a time when Russia was just beginning to be perceived as the next potential threat by US politicians. 'Perhaps you should try to understand us,' Ryan's character gently admonishes the young Russian at the end of the film – words that ring particularly hollowly in the light of the hysteria which would soon grip Hollywood.Politics aside, the film provides decent entertainment. Merle Oberon fails to disguise her heady exoticism in her role as a German, but we'll forgive her that simply because she has such beguiling cheek bones. Ryan is handsome and tall – and effortlessly superior to all those around him as his unlikely comrades pretty much stand back and allow him to sort things out. There's one effective sequence in which a fatally wounded spy dressed as a clown (long story) scrambles across the dusty rubble of Frankfurt's ruins, hotly pursued by a couple of Nazi thugs. He eludes them, only to fall, dying, at our hero's feet, just enough breath left in him to whisper a key piece of information. Good stuff.

First-rate noir, one of many to unfold within the ominous mood of war-torn Europe (with the standard of such fare being set by next year's THE THIRD MAN). It is also one of several emanating from this era to follow a documentary-style pattern – which, however, renders it heavy-going in this case and is ultimately what dates it most of all. The title ranks it besides among a number of espionage thrillers set aboard a train; again, the template for these is THE LADY VANISHES (1938), with which this even shares one of its actors (Paul Lukas, still traveling incognito but now being the abducted party rather than the one doing the kidnapping!).Having mentioned Hitchcock's film, this is yet another effort by director Tourneur in that tradition (incidentally, he followed it with the recently-viewed CIRCLE OF DANGER [1951] and NIGHT OF THE DEMON [1957], co-scripted by Hitchcock regular Charles Bennett). In fact, the plot basically resolves itself in a handful of striking suspense sequences: an explosion in a train compartment; a kidnapping at a busy train station; a 39 STEPS-like 'memory test' in a club; a showdown in an abandoned brewery; and a near-strangling during yet another train journey ingeniously reflected in the glass of a parallel sleeping-car.The rest of the cosmopolitan cast includes American Robert Ryan (by now growing nicely as a leading man), 'French' Merle Oberon (amusingly, she confounds her fellow passengers by alternating between languages when they initially try 'hitting' on her; even if lovingly photographed by cinematographer husband Lucien Ballard, she is perhaps over-age to fill the romantic interest spot and is saddled throughout with a silly feathered hat!), Frenchman Charles Korvin (effectively emerging as the real villain of the piece), Briton Robert Coote (usually there to provide comic relief, he plays it reasonably straight in this case) and, in what constitutes a bit part (as a murder victim), German Fritz Kortner; conversely, future genre stalwart Charles McGraw's not negligible role as a high-ranking U.S. military officer is bafflingly unbilled!