Night Train to Munich (1940) | Presenting Hitchcock Podcast

Gooooood evening. In this month’s episode of Presenting Hitchcock, Cory and Aaron are armoured up against the enemy as they discuss Night Train to Munich (the would be sequel to The Lady Vanishes).

Written by: Sidney Gilliat and Frank Launder

Based on the novel by Gordon Wellesley

Starring: Margaret Lockwood, Rex Harrison, Paul Henreid, Basil Radford, and Naunton Wayne

Directed by: Carol Reed

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The film has been compared to The Lady Vanishes, with the Princeton academic Michael Wood describing it as an “ironic remake”; the publicity at the time of release erroneously claimed it is a sequel. It has a similar situation in a war-torn continental Europe and both have scripts by Launder and Gilliat. The two slightly eccentric and cricket-mad English travellers, Charters and Caldicott, are carried over. The films are otherwise similar in setting, and both feature similar lead character types: the damsel in distress and eccentric upper-class British gentlemen spy, manifesting in the first film as Iris (played by Margaret Lockwood) and Gilbert, and in the second as Anna Bomasch (also played by Lockwood) and Dickie Randall.

The film was based on a short story by Gordon Wellesley which Sidney Gilliat claims only constituted the first ten minutes of the film, the rest came from him and Launder.

This was the last of the several films that Margaret Lockwood made for Sir Carol Reed. Their professional relationship ended after she turned down the female lead in Kipps.

Considering the release dates of this movie, August 1940 in the UK and December 1940 in the US, there are many remarkable depictions of the onerous nature of the Nazi system, something not fully appreciated even by UK audiences at the time. The UK had bent over backwards to accommodate Adolf Hitler in the late 1930s, and the war had only gotten serious a few months earlier in 1940 with the debacle at Dunkirk in France (May to June) and followed by the aerial Battle of Britain (July to October), which was well underway when this movie was released. The US would not enter the war for a full year after its December release date.

Generally thought of as the first theatrical film where an actor portrayed Adolf Hitler. English music-hall star Billy Russell portrayed the German dictator in an uncredited role.

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Next up, we’ll be discussing One Hour Photo

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