Berlin Express
Director: Jacques Tourneur
Year: 1948
Rating: 6.0
A half-smoked cigarette is dropped to the floor
of a train station and three men scramble for it like a last meal. It is
post-war Germany and cigarettes are currency for everything. Produced three
years after the war ended by RKO and directed by Jacques Tourneur. In the
opening credits the filmmakers thank the British, American and Russian sector
commanders for their permission in allowing them to film there. It is a fascinating
film more for the location shooting and the political points it tries to
make than the film itself. It is shot primarily in Frankfurt and Berlin and
there is utter devastation everywhere. Buildings great and small like decaying
ghosts, the allied military in charge of everything. Scene after scene of
it. It makes you realize just how vital the Marshall Plan was to the re-building
of the country.
In this atmosphere there is one man who
wants to plan for the unification of Germany and for peace. Dr. Bernhardt
and there are forces that want to kill him and his plan. He and his female
secretary take a train for Berlin from Paris. On board are assassins. And
regular citizens. Among them an American, an Englishman, a Russian soldier
and a Frenchman that the narrator who kick starts the film tells us was in
the underground. One of each of the allied army now occupying Germany. Churchill
had given his Iron Curtain speech two years previously and the Russian is
suspect in all of their minds. The film in its way is sending us a message
that we all have to get together, work together. That clearly didn't work
out so well in the future but in 1948 there were still hopes.
There is a failed attempt to kill Bernhardt
on the train with a hand grenade. They all make it to Frankfurt where they
are questioned by the military but allowed to go on to Berlin - but Bernhardt
is kidnapped at the train station. The secretary convinces them to help her
look for them. Since she is Merle Oberon, that is not difficult. They walk
through the debris of the city, almost a land of phantoms - small illegal
clubs exist among the ruins where beer is drunk and shows go on. It's a big
city though as they trawl through it looking for a sign of the Doctor.
It gets fairly good once the narrator (Paul Stewart) stops and just allows
the film to speak for itself. But mainly it is the city speaking to us. How
grand it once was. Brought to this by one madman, his fanatical followers
and people who stayed silent. Robert Ryan plays the American, Chales Korvin
the Frenchman, Paul Lukas is Bernhardt, Robert Coote the Brit and Roman Toporow
the Russian.
