User Reviews

It's a fast-paced thriller about a mob of Himmler's goons in post-war Berlin who kidnap an American GI, the son of a big wheel in the ferris business, and who want to trade the kid back for a pair of burnt-out old anti-Nazi Germans so they can torture and kill them as revenge.

Get that? If not, it's not too important. The movie will make things almost clear enough. It's a lot of fun to watch. The acting required is negligible -- the plot is everything.

Broderick Crawford does his "junkman" number from an earlier movie, a blustering materialist who comes to Germany to cut through the red tape and see that his kidnapped son is returned regardless of the cost. The price is the return of those two anti-Nazis, one of them already deliberately blinded by the Gestapo because of his involvement in the plot to assassinate Hitler. By the end of the movie, Crawford has seen the human face of Cold War intrigue and decides that the elderly couple should be saved.

His feelings, of course, are as irrelevant after his change of heart as they were before. The job is in the hands of stern but human Major Gregory Peck. Peck snaps out orders and calls everyone by diminutives -- Stansman is "Stanzy," Frau Hoffmeier is "Hoffy," Colonel Ludovich is "Ludy", Petrochine is "Petey", and so on, so obsessively that one wonders if Nunally Johnson actually visualized the script.

There's a little hole in the plot too, or maybe it's somewhere in my frontal lobes. Peck discovers that his former girl friend Hoffy is actually a spy for the Russkies (or for Himmler's thugs, it's not clear). And she realizes at a critical point that Peck knows. How does she realize it? I don't know. In the scene, Peck seems to do nothing that would arouse her suspicions. Maybe she is a Jungian intuitive type.

But who cares? You can't really take any of this seriously, not even the deaths that crop up in the story, because we have never seen the people who die. And the film is leavened with occasional shots of humor. Barnaby Jones -- I mean Buddy Ebson as the wisecracking sergeant keeps poking his head into a room full of guys listening to the radio and asks who's ahead -- the Yankees again? And Ebson also has to go through one of those scenes in which he samples a bottle of absinthe, grimaces, shudders, and starts to speak in a hoarse whisper before clearing his throat and speaking normally. There is a running gag about a doctor who is trying to quit smoking by never carrying any cigarettes around, except that he keeps bumming them off other people. In my opinion the most amusing scene is one in which a British intelligence agent visits Peck and the two of them have soft drinks. On his way out, the Brit pauses at the door then walks back and leans over the secretary and asks what that stuff was in the brown bottle. "Root beer, sir," she replies. He thinks for a moment, then comments, "Curious sort of stuff, don't you think?" and leaves the room.

Enjoyable minor film kind of drags you along with its quick unfolding of events.

Given the fact that this film starred Gregory Peck, it couldn't help but be entertaining and worth seeing. However, as far as Peck films made during his best years in Hollywood, this is definitely not one of his more memorable films. Most of the problems lie in the plot and the very unsatisfying ending, though the actors seem to give it their best.

The film begins with a common soldier being kidnapped in Berlin. However, this is no ordinary soldier, as his father is a loud-mouth industrialist played, not surprisingly, by Broderick Crawford. When Crawford impulsively shows up in Berlin to kick butt and demand action, he comes up against a colonel from military intelligence (Peck) who puts Crawford in his place but good. Given that the kidnappers were probably working for the Russians, Crawford's blustering and willingness to pay any ransom is rather hollow. After all, the communists probably could have cared less. So it's up to Peck to first establish why the guy was kidnapped and to see what he can do to get him returned.

While there are a few plot twists along the way, the film ends very poorly. In an ending rife with holes, Peck cheats the Russians out of their prize and gets the kid back--leaving you to assume that shortly afterward, the Russians just kidnapped some other poor shmoe and once again demanded a prisoner exchange or shot the guy to teach the Americans a lesson. Duh. Talk about a non-ending! Had the film ended well, it would have earned a 7 or even an 8. As it is, it's watchable but ultimately rather disappointing despite Peck's competent performance.

It seems that someone pulled the plug on 1954's "Night People." There is a very good plot here about a young American soldier being kidnapped by the Communists in post-World War 11 East Germany. Broderick Crawford, in his usual tough no nonsense portrayals, comes to Berlin to make sure that no one is goofing off on getting his son free as well as to show that his a lot of political ties.

What I found interesting here is that the usual gang buster Crawford quiets down and even changes his opinion once he finds out the elements of the entire story. Seems that the East Germans want to exchange his son for an elderly couple, the wife was British and the husband was a German army official, blinded by the Nazis. Appears that the British wife was informing allied intelligence of Nazi activities during the war.

Peck is in his usual fine form as someone seeking justice and finding out along the way that his German female assistant is not everything she was cracked up to be.

The film needs to have excitement with such a plot but we don't get it at all. Even the drinking of the poison is not shown with any zest at all.

Copyright 11 March 1954 by 20th Century-Fox Film Corp. New York opening at the Roxy: 12 March 1954. U.S. release: March 1954. U.K. release: August 1954. Australian release: 3 June 1954. Sydney opening at the Regent. 11 reels. 8,359 feet. 93 minutes.

SYNOPSIS: When Corporal Johnny Leatherby (Ted Avery) is kidnapped by East Berlin Reds after saying goodnight to his German sweetheart, Kathy Gerhardt (Marianne Koch), trouble really begins. His father, Charles Leatherby (Broderick Crawford), a tycoon from Toledo, Ohio, arrives in Berlin to get his boy back through his powerful political influence. State Department's Fred Hobart (Casey Adams) takes him to see the C.I.C. man working on the case, Colonel Steve Van Dyke (Gregory Peck), in whose office works a U.S. secretary, Ricky Cates (Rita Gam), and M/Sergeant Eddie McColloch (Buddy Ebsen).

NOTES: Fox's 7th CinemaScope feature. Jed Harris and Tom Reed were nominated for an Academy Award for Best Motion Picture Story, losing to Philip Yordan's Broken Lance. Producer/screenwriter Nunnally Johnson's debut as director.

COMMENT: A dull slice of Cold War propaganda which forces the viewer to sit still while the players ping-pong incessant information dialogue across the CinemaScope screen. Almost no action, despite actual location filming in Berlin. A dull, cliché-ridden, jingoistic and simplistic script, compounded by even duller direction. Peck is dull too. And with lines like he has, who can blame him? But we expected more from Sweden's top actress Anita Bjork, here making her Hollywood movie debut. "Miss Julie" is wasted in a thankless role.

The Broderick Crawford character holds out a promise of bombastic fireworks, but even this fizzles out. Miss Gam is likewise not utilized, whilst Peter Van Eyck is made to mark time in an equally small, utterly thankless role. At least Buddy Ebsen is occasionally if rather mechanically amusing, especially given the uninspired and even embarrassingly trite material he's forced to work with. Walter Abel is also cast for comic relief but he performs consistently poorly. Clarke's photography is early CinemaScope grainy, whilst the music is appropriately flag-waving.

I believe the reason the Reds kidnapped the soldier was because he was visiting his girlfriend in the Russian Zone of Berlin, while the old couple avoided it religiously. The prisoner swap was a stretch, I'll admit. The plot-point about former Nazis wanting the anti-Hitler-plotting old couple is hardly half the story. Not only did the KGB use Heinrich Mueller (head of the Gestapo) in recruiting former German agents, but they also employed and protected an even more famous ex-Nazi -- Martin Bormann. Yes, some real rascals, those Bolshies. I can't agree that this was any kind of ordinary Cold_War film, as I know of very few of any kind. "Big Jim Mclaine" was a live-action, comic-book sort of movie, although loosely based in fact after Communist-controlled unions in Hawaii did try to strangle the island with strikes for 177 days in 1949. Hitchcock's "Torn Curtain" and the awesome "Topaze" were two more. "The Third man" was tangentially about the Cold War in Vienna -- the real center for Cold War espionage, not Berlin. Even discounting the fact that many "Cold War" movies were actually defeatist, moral-equivocating messes, I'd still guess the 4 years of WW II accounted for 200 times more movies than the entire 1922-1989 Cold War, which was 200 times more interesting than tank battles and amphibious landings, and much more important for Americans to understand.