In short: Berlin Express (1948)

Europe, under occupation after World War II. After a prologue that informs the audience something nefarious is going to go down, we are introduced to a group of passengers, strangers all, boarding a US army train to Frankfurt.

Things start to become rather interesting when one of the passengers, supposedly a German peace activist with the Allieds’ ears called Dr Bernhardt, is killed by a bomb. It will eventually turn out that the man who was killed was only a decoy, but the real Heinrich Bernhardt (Paul Lukas) is soon kidnapped by Nazis still dreaming of rebuilding their bloody Reich. Apparently, we can never get rid of those completely. Bernhardt’s French secretary Lucienne (Merle Oberon), manages to convince some of the other passengers to stop their post-war squabbling for long enough to help her find him. When actually working together, these men – American Robert Lindley (Robert Ryan), British James Sterling (Robert Coote), Frenchman Perrot (Charles Korvin) and Soviet Lieutenant Kiroshilov (Roman Toporow) – might even manage to do some good.

Which is really rather the point of a movie that’s very clearly realizing the direction the world is going after the War, and suggesting that the old fashioned notion of people from all nations and walks of life working together to improve everyone’s lot might just lead to a better world than the old way of every nation for themselves. The film’s even mildly optimistic about this possibility, at least rather more optimistic than most of today’s news will make one.

Structurally, this is not one of director Jacques Tourneur’s masterpieces. The problems lie with a script that, clearly relishing the opportunity to use the ruins of Frankfurt and Berlin as thriller backdrops for reasons of excitement as well as enlightenment, still uses a sometimes never-ending off-screen monologue to stop the film dead in its tracks repeatedly and provide exposition and teachable moments in a tone somewhere between hardboiled narration and dry and only mildly clever documentary, informing the audience of 1948 of what one hopes they already knew from their newspapers. It’s a bit of a shame, really, for the shots of ruined cities, the desperate, real-life surrealism of post-war existence in Germany, and the film’s actual plot don’t really need this kind of help at all, providing as they do a much better picture of the world than the narration ever could.

In fact, whenever the big voice from nowhere pauses and allows the plot and the characters to move by their own volition, things turn into an actual Tourneur movie full of shadowy corners, men and women with complicated motives trying to navigate shadows metaphorical and real through thrilling set pieces.


The film really wants to believe what Bernhardt preaches even if the state of the world makes it sound utopian, keeping a bit of hope up even knowing the realities of life. It’s a bit sad looked at from today, too, for humanity clearly has learned little from any of the things Berlin Express is talking about, perpetuating childish squabbling that turns bloody more often than not, even opening doors and podiums to Nazis and their ilk again.