Night People (1954)

A Disappointing Continuation

I really wanted to like this movie. I feel terribly cynical trashing it, and that's why I'm giving it a middling 5. Actually, I'm giving it a 5 because there were some superb performances.

This is a coming of age storyline that you've seen in one form or another for decades. It takes a truly unique voice to make yet another one worth watching.

Great story, amazing characters, superb action, enthralling cinematography. Yes, this is something I am glad I spent money on.

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.

Back in 1954, this spy film appeared on the Silver Screen. When it did, it was not promoted as a spy thriller to audiences. However, this is was one of those particular movies called " Night People " which does produces a bigger bang than one expects. The story as written by Jed Harris and directed by Nunnally Johnson begins slowly and tells of a single United States soldier, Cpl. John Leatherby (Ted Avery) stationed in West Germany shortly after W.W. II. After his kidnapping, the Americans are notified. A noise which is heard in the state department and there after reaches the the parents of the young soldier, who happens to have some very powerful friends, one which takes his millionaire status and starts banging on Washington doors to get his son back. Back in Germany, the problem lands on the stoop of one, Col. Steve Van Dyke (Gregory Peck) who is ordered to resolve the issue. He is an experienced soldier, but is hindered by the boy's Father (Broderick Crawford) who tries to throw his weight around and ably assisted by Sgt. Eddie McColloch (Buddy Ebsen). Dealing with the other major powers controlling the Eastern section of the Berlin Wall, proves a difficult task, what with the rise of the Russians, Ex-Nazis, double agents and political victims all vining for his attention. What we expect as an audience members is a sleeper, instead this film lays the foundation of later Tom Clancy type spy thrillers and Gregory Peck does a notable job in his role. Without hesitation I would recommend this movie due to the participation of Broderick Crawford, Buddy Ebsen, Anita Björk and Marianne Koch, and all the rest of the cast who made this remarkable film a classic. ****

Nunnally Johnson has been awarded every prize a screenwriter can be given. This film, with its many strengths, demonstrates why as well as does any of his efforts. The storyline here is both complex and adult; it is a Cold War thriller with very-strongly-developed characters, fine performances and great B/W production values throughout. Johnson wrote the script from a story by Jed Harris and directed. The story revolves around a Colonel played strongly by Gregory Peck who is in charge of US forces in Berlin who are dealing daily with the four powers governing their sectors there. Three challenges weigh on him at once. The Russian counterpart he has been trying to help defect is murdered; a young US serviceman is inexplicably kidnapped after meeting the German girl he loves, and demands are made by the Russians to get into their hands two persons in exchange for the soldier. Then the young man's industrialist father arrives to complicate matters further, making demands, while the Colonel discovers a traitor in his own circle of operatives. There are many fine performances in the well-chosen cast, headed by Peck's very strong military character, aided by Walter Abel and Buddy Ebsen; others noteworthy include Peter Van Eyck, Max Showalter, Jill Esmond, Marianne Koch, Anita Bjork and Broderick Crawford. Lovely Rita Gam plays the Colonel's secretary and steals every scene she is in. I found the military-parade pre-opening too-long; but the dialogue, characters and situations were everywhere absorbing and amazing memorable; had Johnson done nothing bu the scripts for this and "The Dirty Dozen", his place in Hollywood history would be secure. I suggest that with all its fine technical and creative aspects, when viewers talk about films "they used to make but can't or don't make any more", "Night People" is exactly the sort of powerful and adult film they have in mind.

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.