Night Train to Munich

Night Train to Munich is a 1940 British comedy-thriller directed by Carol Reed, in which a British undercover agent played by Rex Harrison rescues a Czech scientist and his daughter from Nazi custody. It reunites the leading lady and the screenwriters of Alfred Hitchcock's The Lady Vanishes (1938), Margaret Lockwood and the team of Frank Launder and Sidney Gilliat, and it shares with that film the comic characters Charters and Caldicott and the espionage-on-a-train subgenre.^{1 • 2}

Production

The film was planned just before the outbreak of war in September 1939 under the working title Gestapo, from Gordon Wellesley's serialized novel Report on a Fugitive, set in a fictitious state called Ironia. According to Gilliat, the source contributed little: "We used up Gordon's story in the first ten minutes and invented the rest." Once Launder and Gilliat came on board, the tone shifted decisively toward comedy-thriller.²

Studio circumstances. The picture was produced by the British arm of Twentieth Century-Fox at the Rank studios at Shepherd's Bush, with a crew largely recruited from Gainsborough Studios, which had been closed because its tall tower was feared to be a target for bombing raids. With Hitchcock now in Hollywood working on Rebecca, the assignment went to Reed, whose previous film The Stars Look Down (1939) had placed him among Britain's leading directors; film historian William K. Everson wrote that Night Train "would undoubtedly have been given to Hitchcock had he not left."²

The male lead was first intended for Michael Redgrave, Lockwood's co-star in The Lady Vanishes, but he was otherwise engaged, and the part went to the 31-year-old Rex Harrison in his first lead in a major film. Harrison relished masquerading as a Nazi officer; "Rex just loved that uniform," Gilliat recalled.² Paul Henreid was then billed as Paul von Hernried, the shortened form of his Viennese birth name; a genuine anti-Nazi dissident, he left for Hollywood as soon as shooting ended, narrowly avoiding internment as an enemy alien, and became famous as Paul Henreid in Now, Voyager and Casablanca.²

Censorship context. The scenes of Lockwood in a concentration camp were, according to the BFI, fairly unique for the period, because the Ministry of Information feared reprisals against British prisoners of war if films exaggerated camp conditions.¹ The film was made and released during the Phony War, before the fall of France, Dunkirk, and the Blitz, when the full horrors of Nazism were not yet widely known and Hitler and his storm troopers were often treated as figures of fun in British films.²

Relationship to The Lady Vanishes

Because Night Train to Munich shares its screenwriters, its leading lady, the double act of Charters and Caldicott (Basil Radford and Naunton Wayne), and its espionage-train-thriller subgenre with The Lady Vanishes, it has often been dismissed as an imitation of Hitchcock's film; some publicity at the time even claimed it was a sequel.^{2 • 7} Critics have divided over the comparison. Time Out's review judged that Reed "fatally lacks Hitchcock's light, witty touch," while the Criterion essay by the film critic and historian Philip Kemp argues the comparison does Reed's film less than justice, calling it "an ingenious, tongue-in-cheek roller coaster of a thriller."^{8 • 2}

The film does hold one advantage over its model: released in May 1940, after Britain had entered the war, it could identify its villains unequivocally and mock them openly. Radford and Wayne were given more scope for comedy than in The Lady Vanishes, in running gags about a prized set of golf clubs left in Berlin and Charters's dogged attempts to read Mein Kampf.²

Reception and legacy

The film was warmly received on both sides of the Atlantic. Theodore Strauss's review in The New York Times of December 30, 1940 called it "the year's most perilous ride" and "the swiftest and most harrowing thriller to come out of England since the Hitchcock work," and the film ran for fifteen weeks in New York.² The Motion Picture Herald review of June 8, 1940 praised its topicality, noting that the London trade showing occurred just after the evacuation of British soldiers from Dunkirk and the fall of France.⁴ On Rotten Tomatoes the film holds 89% from 18 critics and 72% from more than 500 audience ratings.⁵

Reed himself was embarrassed by the bargain-basement model work in the cable-car finale: "I remember at the time thinking that the mountains looked like ice cream. But the war was on, Gainsborough had a very small stage, and it was a very bad model."² The film later came to be seen as a lighthearted preparatory sketch for the thrillers of Reed's postwar maturity, Odd Man Out (1947) and The Third Man (1949), and it was restored for a Criterion Collection release as spine number 523, with a 2010 conversation between the film scholars Bruce Babington, author of a study of Launder and Gilliat, and Peter Evans, author of a study of Carol Reed.^{2 • 3}

References

1. Night Train to Munich (1940), British Film Institute
2. Philip Kemp, "Night Train to Munich: A Last Laugh," The Criterion Collection, June 23, 2010
3. Night Train to Munich, The Criterion Collection (film page)
4. Night Train (1940), AFI Catalog of Feature Films
5. Night Train to Munich, Rotten Tomatoes
6. The Depiction of Germans in British Film (Open University thesis)
7. Taking the Train with Margaret Lockwood, Cinema Cities
8. Night Train to Munich, Time Out film review

Topic: Encyclopedia › Arts and culture › Screen and stage › Film and television › Films and standalone screen works › Individual films by title and year › Crime, thriller, and mystery films (individual works) › 1920s–1940s films

Initially written Oct 3, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 15, 2026; Oct 25, 2026; Nov 1, 2026 · Last review: Oct 25, 2026

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