Artivels Undescribable Perfection

Curapedi I cannot think of one single thing that I would change about this film. The acting is incomparable, the directing deft, and the writing poignantly brilliant.

Tobias Burrows It's easily one of the freshest, sharpest and most enjoyable films of this year.

Freeman This film is so real. It treats its characters with so much care and sensitivity.

Prismark10 This film has shades of Hitchcock, there is even a mind reader act reminiscent to The 39 Steps and Mr Memory.This is an effective thriller with a semi documentary overtones and location shooting in a bombed out Frankfurt and Berlin after the war. Director Jacques Tourneur makes effective use of the locations but this is a somewhat muddled thriller.A train from Paris to Berlin has Robert Ryan playing an American agricultural expert, Robert Coote, a British teacher, Roman Toporow a Russian soldier and Charles Korvin, a French official.Merle Oberon is another French national who is accompanying German Paul Lukas who was a leader of the anti Hitler German underground and who has plans to present at a conference for German unification in the post war period.Lukas is also a marked man, an assassination attempt has gone wrong and he is later kidnapped. The others get together to find him.The film made in 1948 foreshadows the Cold War with distrust between the Russians and the Americans. The film gives thought that a divided Germany might not had been the best solution.

alpikecp The film brings back many memories as I was a small child in Frankfort in 1946-47; my father was with the US Army, and worked in the I.G. Farben building. I remember riding the continuous elevators, and enjoying milk shakes in the restaurant. I recall having lunch many times with my mother in a restaurant across the street from the train station. Years later I would visit Frankfort many times enjoying great tasty burgers, sausages, and beer at the train station, and traveling out of there for other German and Swiss cities. I toured the I.G. Farben building and even found the house we called our home during those years.

JurorNumberThirteen A very average film noir only made interesting as a piece of social history in its location filming around Berlin and Frankfurt. The documentary style voice over used a lot at the beginning of the filim I found irritating and the script and Miss Oberon's performance were poor. The rest of the leading players are average apart from the ever reliable Robert Coote playing his English toff. The images filmed in Germany were sobering to say the least. The portrayal of the distrust in Germans in 1948 and the scale of devastation of Berlin and Frankfurt compared to now was very quite shocking. My father was in Germany just after the war and was guarded when talking about his time there but was visibly upset when he talked about how tough it was just to exist in Germany at that time.

JoeytheBrit 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.