Night Train to Munich

Just before the occupation of Czechoslovakia, a scientist working on armour plating is spirited to England; his daughter is left behind and sent to a camp. She escapes and reaches London. But the escape was a planted trap and the Germans are following her to find her father. Then a British agent puts on a German officer's uniform. The subject is not espionage but the tension of the disguise. The agent spends the whole second half in an enemy uniform, and the danger comes not from guns but from one wrong sentence. The form is fast and light; despite being a war picture the tone is close to comedy. The cable car sequence at the end is among the most cited action passages in the genre. The film was made in Britain in the second year of the war and served a propaganda function. Carol Reed directs, from a screenplay by Sidney Gilliat and Frank Launder, the pair who had written Hitchcock's The Lady Vanishes a few years earlier; two supporting characters from that film, the cricket-obsessed English pair, reappear here played by the same actors. Margaret Lockwood plays the daughter, Rex Harrison the agent and Paul Henreid the German officer. Who it is for: viewers who like classic British spy films and train thrillers. Who it is not for: anyone wanting a realistic war narrative; the film keeps the danger light and the tone deliberately entertaining.