With all the site’s recent reviews of films and games from the past ten years, it’s nice to get the chance to go way back to the world of 1940 and see how, even right at the start of World War 2, the Nazis were just perfect movie villains. While this may not have been quite as daring as later films fighting the Nazis might have been, as most Nazi atrocities weren’t common knowledge in England back then, it is quite simply never not fun to watch charming Allied forces (or at least Czech civilians and a British secret agent) outwit and outgun them.
The film is set in 1939. As the Nazis begin sweeping into Czechoslovakia, an old Czech industrialist that’s developed a new method of armor-plating vehicles flees to England for fear of being imprisoned and forced to give his secret to the Nazis. Unfortunately, he doesn’t flee fast enough to pick up his daughter, who is captured and imprisoned in a concentration camp to try to break her spirit enough that she’ll reveal her father’s whereabouts. Fortunately for her, she manages to befriend a Englishman imprisoned at the camp, who manages to break the two of them out and flee to England together. Unfortunately for her, he’s actually a Nazi plant that knows that if he keeps close to her, it’s only a matter of time before he can get her and her father on a boat back to Germany…
It’s kind of interesting watching such an early effort from director Carol Reed, who would later go on to helm one of the greatest noirs of all time in The Third Man. This was somewhat less impressive, but still as fun and droll as a British spy caper would be expected to be. While the opening scenes in Czechoslovakia and the concentration camp aren’t all that airy and light, once all the spy and counterspy maneuverings begin the film just lights up and becomes as clever and silly as many of Hitchcock’s 30s British spy films (though not quite as good as The Lady Vanishes, or as dark as Sabotage, but come on, being as good as mid-range Hitchcock is still pretty damn good). While absent many of his later flourishes (seriously, if you haven’t seen it, go watch The Third Man, it’s one of the most amazing films ever made), he still manages some nice visuals, my favorite occurring back in England, when the daughter (Margaret Lockwood) gets the phone call from her father (James Harcourt) telling her where to meet him. All we see behind her is the shadow of the Nazi that befriended her as he listens in, and we can watch the shadow carefully slip away as she finishes the call. Cinema’s great strength is that it can show instead of telling (go watch Shyamalan’s The Village for an example of how well a film works when everything is told instead of shown), and this is a great early example of how much better that can make things.
It’s good that the writing and directing is so fun, as the acting isn’t all that spectacular, with most of the cast being fairly one note. I can’t complain much, since they all get the job done, but they don’t really go beyond that point. Indeed, the film feels almost like a prototype of how a Nazi spy film should be, not just because it came out almost right after WW2 started, but because everything in it seems like it was developed enough to be good, but not quite legendary. We get a fun gunfight at the end, but it’s still a very basic effort, filled with close-up shots of people on both sides carefully aiming their handguns before firing one-handed because fake guns don’t have recoils. There’s some tension on a train involving the Czech family, Nazi officers, and the British secret agent, but it’s resolved so fast that I barely understood what had happened (admittedly, I was playing Sudoku at the moment, so that may have been my fault).
This isn’t entirely the film’s fault; most great art in any field comes at least partially as a result of trying to outdo everything that had come before it, and there really hadn’t been that many spy thrillers made up to that point. Indeed, I can’t offhandedly name any besides the aforementioned Hitchcock films. Still, as long as you understand what you’re getting into, it’s a perfectly satisfying adventure story, with chases, double crosses, and a teensy dash of romance for the ladies in the audience. Carol Reed would go on to bigger and better things (indeed, he would eventually go on to pick up a Best Director Oscar for Oliver!), but he shows that he already had a sure and steady hand here.
Rating: ***
Note: Apparently the trailer for Night Train to Munich isn’t online anywhere, so here’s an awesome (and tragically brief) scene from The Third Man instead:
Tuesday, January 4, 2011
Night Train to Munich
Monday, February 4, 2008
Breach
Breach pretty much exactly met my expectations going in, in that it delivered a solid if unspectacular drama about the FBI highlighted by some quality acting on the part of Chris Cooper. Three cheers for watered down expectations, I guess.
The film, based on a true story, is about the single biggest breach of our intelligence agencies in the history of the nation. Ryan Philippe stars as a young fed hoping to make agent who is ordered to spy on one of the top agents in the Bureau, played by Cooper, under the guise of being his new page. He eventually learns just how bad Cooper is, and how he’s given up the identities of at least 50 field agents and informants, 3 of which had since been executed by Russia, and finds that it’s no small task spying on one of the greatest intelligence agents in the country. What drives the film is Cooper’s performance, and the work of Laura Linney, who is Philippe’s liaison to the investigation. Both of them do suitably impressive work, as one would expect from them.
The film, however, suffers from simply being too generic. I have no idea how much of the film is actual fact and how much was just glamorized for the film itself (as a general guideline, though, I always assume it’s a lot more of the latter than the former), but the film has an abundance of cliches dragging it down. There’s Philippe’s wife (played by Caroline Dhavernas) who is given the thankless task of disliking his new job and who spends all of her scenes being nonunderstanding and combative (seriously, does the wife ever support her husband in movies like this?). There’s the required scene where he has to swipe vital information from Cooper’s personal effects while he’s out, only for him to return too soon requiring a mad scramble to get everything back together again. There’s the ending, which doesn’t end in a big shootout, but which wouldn’t have been any less familiar territory if it had. Some work was needed on the script level to stamp out these problems.
Don’t get me wrong, it’s certainly a watchable film, and there are indeed parts that are quite entertaining. It’s just not one of the best of its genre, and that’s a little sad given the great potential of its source material. It’s worth a viewing, at least, but don’t be expecting to want to return to it again and again.
Rating: ** ½
Thursday, January 10, 2008
Charlie Wilson's War
Political thrillers are always a pretty tricky genre to deal with. On the whole, the genre tends to be done fairly poorly, with Hollywood either deciding (with admittedly some measure of justification) that their audience needs the final film dumbed down heavily so that everyone will be able to understand it, or just deciding to make it into a clumsy, blunt weapon to beat their political interests into everyone’s heads. It’s to this film’s great credit that, outside of a couple lines here and there, neither of those problems occurs.
The film stars Tom Hanks as Congressman Charlie Wilson, a low-ranking Representative from Texas who gets caught up in trying to help the Afghanis fight off the Russian invasion of their country in the early 80s. Assisting him in this endeavor are Julia Roberts as a fairly fundamentalist Christian millionaire with a lot of influence among similarly religious Congressmen, and (in a brilliant performance) Philip Seymour Hoffman as an abrasive CIA agent that will try anything in his power to get Hanks to heavily increase black ops funding to arm the Afghanis. What’s wonderful about these people is how they’re a pack of fairly charming creeps. Roberts can’t shut up about her religious beliefs even though it’s running the risk of alienating several key financiers, Hoffman chain smokes his way through the film and seems totally unable to meet someone without infuriating them within half a minute, and Hanks doesn’t seem to make it through a single scene without a young female staffer on one arm and a drink in the other (it’s nice how, back in our more idealistic 80s, nothing is thought about him nicknaming one of his pretty young staffers Jailbait). This is some of each actor’s best work; they fully become these people, leaving no trace of their normal personas around, and they all, particularly Hoffman, get some pretty hilarious lines in here and there.
Given all the present-day drama with Afghanistan and Pakistan, it’s an interesting time to make a film about the United States helping to rescue the Afghanis from the Soviets (though I imagine the Afghanis themselves might have a somewhat different opinion as to who was most responsible for their eventual victory). The film works pretty well, though, particularly in how gradual the victory is. Wilson first becomes inspired to help when seeing Dan Rather doing a piece on the situation in 1980, and they don’t manage to get the weapons out there until close to the end of the decade. Even then, it shows us just how minor the conditions for victory are considered, as we see stock footage of fighting, with captions like “Spring 1987: 47 Russian helicopters shot down”, as if that was a major military coup.
The ending doesn’t quite work, as I guess it was fated not to, as they seem to feel obligated to point out how Afghanistan eventually turned out once we had left and try to claim that it’s all our fault for not helping them rebuild after the end of the war, but the movie does work very well up until then. I’m trying right now to think of another political film that I liked as much as this, and I’m frankly finding it difficult to come up with any from this decade other than The Lives of Others. It’s a dying breed of film, heavily weakened by clumsy, ham-handed efforts from writers, directors, and producers trying to hammer audiences with their political leanings, making a film like this that mostly manages to achieve a measure of subtlety and evenness all the more impressive.
Rating: ***
